De Rerum Natura, The Nature of Things: A Poetic Translation 9780520942769, 9780520255937

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The Joan Palevsky

Imprint in Classical Literature

In honor of beloved Virgil— “O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .” —Dante, Inferno

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from Joan Palevsky.

De Rerum Natura The Nature of Things

other translations by david r. slavitt The Theban Plays of Sophocles The Phoenix and Other Translations The Regrets of Joachim Du Bellay The Poetry of Manuel Bandeira Propertius In Love: The Complete Poetry The Book of Lamentations Sonnets of Love and Death of Jean De Sponde The Latin Odes of Jean Dorat The Book of The Twelve Prophets The Voyage of The Argo of Valerius Flaccus João Pinto Delgado’s Poem of Queen Esther Three Amusements of Ausonius The Persians of Aeschylus Celebrating Ladies: The Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes A Crown for the King by Solomon Ibn Gabirol Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs Of Bacchylides Broken Columns: Two Roman Epic Fragments (Statius and Claudian) The Oresteia of Aeschylus The Hymns of Prudentius Sixty-One Psalms of David Seneca: The Tragedies Vol. I Seneca: The Tragedies Vol. II The Metamorphoses of Ovid The Fables of Avianus Ovid’s Poetry of Exile The Tristia of Ovid The Elegies to Delia of Albius Tibullus The Eclogues and the Georgics of Virgil The Eclogues of Virgil

De Rerum Natura The Nature of Things a poetic translation

Lucretius Translated by David R. Slavitt

university of california press berkeley los angeles london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by David R. Slavitt

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lucretius Carus, Titus. [De rerum natura. English] De rerum natura = The nature of things : a poetic translation / Lucretius ; translated by David R. Slavitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25425-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-25593-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Didactic poetry, Latin-Translations into English. 2. Philosophy, Ancient-Poetry. I. Slavitt, David R., 1935– II. Title. III. Title: Nature of things. pa6483.e5s59 2008 187–dc22 2008008263 Manufactured in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Janet

Contents Translator’s foreword ix

the nature of things Book I 1 Book II 48 Book III 95 Book IV 139 Book V 189 Book VI 251

Translator’s Foreword

Lucretius is almost certainly the most important poet whom few reasonably well-educated people have actually read. Santayana wrote about him in his enormously influential Three Philosophical Poets and Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot both learned from Lucretius. From his great poem, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), they each took what they needed to invent modern poetry. And yet, it is the “poetry” that most readers miss, either because they are reading a prose translation or because they are attending to the meaning, often for legitimate academic purposes, while missing the wonderful music. It has been my aim to restore that aspect of Lucretius’s great work. I have chosen to translate his Latin hexameter into English six-beat lines, which are different both from the Latin and the Greek but are slower than the blank verse that is normative in English. My model for this is Richmond Lattimore’s Homer, which I read as a boy and I very much admired (and still do).

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x / Foreword

There is a meditative sweep those lines of his have that I have imitated in a number of my versions of Greek and Latin poems, and I have learned to delight in the way enjambed and endstopped lines can be made to idle or snap just as they would in pentameter and, sometimes, even more smartly. In my version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in my renditions of Statius, Claudian, and Valerius Flaccus I discovered the potentialities and the comforts of this meter in English. Other Latin poets have taught me other kinds of things that are basic to poetry—or once were— even if they have fallen lately into desuetude. It was in doing a version of the Georgics of Virgil that I learned how to modulate the paragraphs of an argument in verse, which is like the modulation of music. Howard Nemerov’s contemplative poetry was what had whetted my appetite for this kind of poetry, but I didn’t want merely to imitate him. I thought that by going to one of the masters and doing what I could with a long discursive poem, I could learn how to manage these things. That poem, too, is didactic and abstract, a construction that depends on shifting timbres more than on narrative drive, and it offers challenges and satisfactions that I think are similar to those to be found in De Rerum Natura. To make it much clearer, let me give an example of Cyril Bailey’s extremely useful prose version of 1947 (in three volumes with prolegomena, critical apparatus, and commentary) and compare it with what I arrived at. The poem, in his version, begins: Mother of Aeneas’ sons, joy of men and gods, Venus the lifegiver, who beneath the gliding stars of heaven fillest with thy presence the sea that carries the ships and the land that bears the crops; for thanks to thee every tribe of living things is conceived, and comes forth to look upon the light of the sun.

Foreword / xi Thou, goddess, thou doest turn to flight the winds and the clouds of heaven, though at thy coming; for thee earth, the quaint artificer puts forth her sweet-scented flowers . . .

It is—and isn’t—what Lucretius is saying. My version begins: Mother of Aeneas and of his Rome, and of gods and men the joy, dear Venus, who underneath the gliding heavenly signals busies the seas with ships and makes earth fruitful (for only through you are living things conceived and because of you they rise up to bask in the light of the sun): from you the harsh winds flee and the skies’ black storm clouds scatter at your approach; for you the intricate earth sprouts flowers . . .

The difference, I hope, is that between talking and singing. But in that passage, Lucretius is being “poetic” in an invocation that is an expected part of a long poem. In a more “prosy” piece of argument, let us compare what the metrics do to an ordinary piece of logical exposition. From line 160 in the Latin, Bailey gives us: For if things came into being from nothing, every kind might be born from all things, nought would need a seed. Firstly, men might arise from the sea, and from the land the race of scaly creatures, and birds burst forth from the sky; cattle and other herds, and all the tribes of wild beasts, with no fixed law of birth, would haunt tilth and desert. Nor would the same fruits stay constant to the trees, but all would change: all trees might avail to bear all fruits.

The interplay of sense and metrical form turns it into this: Consider the contrary case–that being could come from non-being

xii / Foreword and that anything could arise from anything or from nothing, without even a seed. Men could emerge from sea-foam, scaly creatures could come swarming up from the earth, and birds could burst forth from the sky. In meadowlands or deserts cattle and wild beasts could simply appear at random, and trees could bear any fruit haphazardly, for all would be able to bring forth all, interchangeably . . . .

I admire Bailey’s clarity, but I think he assumes that one has the Latin on the table and his translation, which is actually a trot, is only to help in the places where the vocabulary is odd or the grammar is knotty. My fear is that his prose version, and others by other translators, are being read without the Latin, and that contorts and betrays the encounter. My method has been to read along and translate as I go, letting what I take to be the personality of the poem take over. It resonates in my sinuses, and is, in part, me, but it’s certainly not how I ordinarily sound or write. It is an impersonation, a kind of performance that an actor on stage does with lines that are not his but that he tries to give himself to in order to make them his own. My Virgil, my Sophocles, my Prudentius, my Ausonius all sound, then, a little like me, but they do not sound very much like one another. In the Lucretius, I do not worry excessively about some of the details and I sometimes omit a few of the repetitive examples when his point seems to me to have been made clearly enough (my version is perhaps ten percent shorter than the original). I am doing what a director does, making a few cuts here and there for dramatic purposes. Or it can happen that there are things modern science has established that only make it embarrassing

Foreword / xiii

when we dwell too long on those specifics where Lucretius (who was mostly guessing and making up plausible stories) got it wrong. As my good friend Howard Georgi, the eminent physicist, has remarked: Lucretius doesn’t seem to have a clue about science. He is an enthusiastic reductionist, and perhaps more importantly, he argues eloquently that the working of the world is not magic. His argument is based on noticing the regularities of nature— or perhaps more accurately—because they have always been noticed—deciding that the regularity was more important than the occasional irregularity. This suggests that the world has fixed rules and he contrasts this very vividly with a world governed by magic. His fundamental axiom is that there must be some unchanging substructure to the perpetually changing world of birth and decay.

He also said, quite generously, I think: The crucial assumption that the same laws should apply “here on earth” and “up in the sky” must have been easier for Lucretius than for most of his contemporaries because he was loath to grant special status to a heaven. That Lucretius got the laws wrong is hardly surprising. Getting it right took another 1800 years and the genius of Newton.

It is that enthusiasm, that attention to the “regularities of nature” that is the important tenor of this great poem, the brooding quality of a wise man looking at what is and convinced—as Einstein was—that it had to make sense and was explicable. He explained it as well as he could in natural, that is to say non-magical, terms. Dante’s great religious vision of the Commedia, and Goethe’s romantic view as expressed in Faust are the alternatives, and, as

xiv / Foreword

Santayana suggests, each work deserves to be read in the light of the other two.

. . . . . Titus Lucretius Carus was about ten years younger than Cicero and ten years older than Catullus, which means that he lived through the last years of the republic and saw Caesar’s rise to power. We know almost nothing of his life, and those few details we do have are puzzling. The Memmius to whom the poem is dedicated is probably Gaius Memmius, who was praetor in 58 b.c. and governor of Bythnia in 57 b.c.—the man whom Catullus thought was the embodiment of all evil. Lucretius, however, speaks of him with respect and affection. The poem, of course, is a 7500-line-long epic in six books that expounds the physical theories of Epicurus with a view to abolishing superstitious fears of the intervention of the gods in this world and of punishment by the gods in an afterlife. Lucretius argues that the soul is mortal and perishes with the body, and that the universe is made up of atoms infinite in number and moving in space that is infinite in extent. His belief is that pleasure is the object of life and he postulates free will for man that is in some ways analogous to the spontaneity of movement of the atoms. As the Oxford Classical Dictionary, that repository of received ideas, puts it: “He adorned the dry exposition of Epicurus with a wealth of illustration and imagery, derived from a vivid observation of the world, which shows him as the true poet. . . . His lines have a weight and majesty, and often a depth of passion and feeling, which have caused critics to rank him as the equal of Virgil.”

Book I

Mother of Aeneas and of his Rome, and of gods and men the joy, dear Venus, who underneath the gliding heavenly signals busies the seas with ships and makes earth fruitful (for only through you are living things conceived and because of you they rise up to bask in the light of the sun): from you the harsh winds flee and the skies’ black storm clouds scatter at your approach; for you the intricate earth sprouts flowers, wide ocean roads subside into gentle smiling, and furthest reaches of heaven glow serene in response to your prompting. In the spring’s first days, the nurturing western breezes breathe free again, and birds in the air, smitten by you, 1

10

2 / Book I

warble the news of your coming, as beasts of woods and fields cavort in the meadows and splash through brooks—and all for love. Under your spell, all creatures follow your bidding, captive, eager even. Look to the teeming seas, the mountains, the fast-flowing streams, the treetops, or rolling gorse where birds flutter and dance the reel of lust as earth once more renews itself as you have ordained, for you alone govern the nature of things, and nothing comes forth to the light except by you, and nothing joyful or lovely is made. 20 I seek, therefore, your blessing and help in writing these verses that I presume to compose on the Nature of Things, the way things come about and are—for Memmius’s sake, my friend whom you have favored, goddess: for his sake give me words. Make it happen that war interrupts its savage work on land and sea, for this would be within your power and you can bring to mortals that peace we long for as Mars, who is mighty in warfare and rules over bloody deeds, adores you, will lay his head in your lap, defenseless, utterly vanquished and altogether undone by love’s unhealable wound. 30 Gazing upward at you, his neck stretched back, his eyes feeding upon your beauty as, breathless with adoration,

Book I / 3

he listens while you let fall from those luscious lips your coaxing that for your sake, sweet lady, he allow the Romans peace— for in times of trouble and threat, I cannot perform my task nor, so beset, can the Memmii’s noble son neglect his duties’ demands. I pray for peace, such as the gods, immortal, enjoy, cut off as they are from the world’s woes. Free of all threat of danger, divinity has no need of us and our rites or reason to fret at our impotent anger. 40 For the rest, Memmius, friend, turn your keen mind, detached from the cares of the office you hold to these philosophical questions that I will address and with all my talents attempt to make clear. Do not turn away or hold in contempt these earnest efforts but give me your patience while I expound for your understanding the laws of the heavens, explain the ways of the gods, and reveal first principles—how all things in nature are made, how they increase and are nourished, and how in its time nature dissolves them again and reduces them back to the seeds of what we refer to as Matter: what we explain is being 50 and becoming, for from these primary bodies all things arise. It was long the case that men would grovel upon the earth, crushed beneath the weight of Superstition whose head

4 / Book I

loomed in the heavens, glaring down with her dreadful visage until Epicurus of Greece dared to look up and confront her, taking a stand against the fables and myths of the gods with their stories of those impending thunderbolts from above and the vengeful roar of the skies that merely provoked his courage and strengthened his will to defy them and shatter the bars of the cage where Nature was kept in confinement. By the lively force of his mind 60 he triumphed, forcing a breach through flaming walls of the world to travel the universe in thought and imagination and return from his adventure bearing the prize of knowledge of what can come into being and what cannot, the limits of the powers of things and their clear and orderly boundary lines. Superstition is now unseated and trampled down while by his thought is mankind exalted as high as the heavens. But one thing gives me pause—that you may see in my effort to tread the paths of reason some risk of impiety. No! The opposite is the case, for Superstition produces 70 wicked, even unholy, behavior. Think of that host at Aulis where Diana’s altar was fouled with the blood of Iphigenia: they decked the maiden’s hair with the fillets

Book I / 5

of sacrifice and she knew, when she saw her sorrowing father surrounded by his attendants hiding the terrible knife and the people assembled weeping silent, bitter tears, what was about to happen. Think of that poor girl who looked in vain to the king whom she had first called father and trembled as men laid hands upon her and bore her not to a flower-decked marriage altar with songs of loud rejoicing 80 but a sorrowing victim, immaculate virgin, to be defiled by her father’s hand in order that fair winds favor the fleet. By Superstition we are driven to deeds of such great evil. Someday even you may listen to one of these priests’ empty threats and, in need or a moment of weakness, be tempted to listen as they conjure their vain dreams and sow seeds of doubt of the rules of right living and put your welfare at risk. It sounds good enough, but men, if only they saw some limit to tribulation, could answer, summoning strength to defy the threats of their myths and superstitions. 90 Who is so tough-minded that he can resist their stories of everlasting torments they tell us we face after death? Who can say for sure what the soul’s nature might be, whether it is born with us or in some way existed before we were born and somehow installed itself? Who knows whether it dies when we do or lives on somewhere as a shade in the huge caverns of Orcus’s gloom, or can it live on

6 / Book I

here on earth, perhaps in some animal’s being? So our own great Ennius sang, who first brought down the laurel from Helicon’s height to win fame among the Italians. 100 In immortal verse, he proposes as well another idea— that of the gloomy realm of Acheron, where neither bodies nor souls endure except as the vaguest likeness of what they had been in life. There, he imagines Homer, ever-blooming and fresh, arising before him, weeping, as he begins to expound on the hidden nature of things. What we have to do is establish first principles: stars and the sun and moon and how they move about in the heavens; and what are the laws that govern what happens here on earth? And before everything else, we must observe and reason precisely 110 about the source of the spirit, the anima, and its nature, and also that of its partner, the animus, or mind. How can it happen that things we encounter in waking life return to appear before us in terrifying aspect when we are afflicted with illness or deep in sleep and dreaming, so that we see and hear—or think that we do—close by us these wraiths, these simulacra, of those who are dead and whose bones we well know lie in the earth’s unremitting embrace? I am not unaware of how difficult it will be to make clear in these Latin verses obscure refinements 120

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of what the Greeks discovered. Our language needs to be stretched and we shall be forced to invent new words for the new occasions I know will arise. And yet I undertake this task your merit deserves, in the hope that I may find delight in your continuing friendship, for the sake of which I labor awake through the silent nights in my search for the right words and cadences I may use to cast that bright, clear light in your mind of understanding of the hidden heart of things. This terror, then, of the animus, this darkness of mind must be dispelled, not by the sun’s light or its rays’ shafts 130 but by careful observation and understanding of inner laws of how nature works. To start with, the first rule is that nothing can come from nothing, not even by will of the gods. Mortal men are afraid as they look about them and see the many things that happen on earth and up in the sky, and they cannot tell why or how and therefore think that gods must bring them about by fiat. But if our axiom holds and nothing can come of nothing, then we are obliged to look further to learn what we want to know—how each thing was created and how, without the gods, all things have come to be. 140 Consider the contrary case—that being could come from non-being

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and that anything could arise from anything or from nothing, without even a seed. Men could emerge from sea-foam, scaly creatures could come swarming up from the earth, and birds could burst forth from the sky. In meadowlands or deserts cattle and wild beasts could simply appear at random, and trees could bear any fruit haphazardly, for all would be able to bring forth all, interchangeably. No bodies would produce their own kind: the idea of motherhood and fatherhood would give way. But it is not 150 so, and we know how each kind comes from its seed, in a fixed, unvarying manner, and everything that is born and makes its way to the light has its material source in whatever came before it. It cannot happen that things can arise and be begotten from anything else: in each is a unique nature and individual power that sets it apart and defines it. Why do we always see roses bloom in the early spring or grain grow in the summer’s heat, or grapes on their vines ripen in season in autumn, except that these life forms know from the code that was there in their seeds what to do and when 160 so that the teeming earth brings forth in safety its fragile beings that grow in the sunlight? Suppose that they just appeared,

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popping up out of nowhere at unpredictable moments, would they not come out of season at hostile times of the year without some initial prompting, with neither restraint nor order of generation that offers nature’s many protections? And speaking of generation, what would be the need of time for maturation? Why would there be any wait for infants to grow into youth or seedlings to turn into trees? But as we know well, one step must follow another as seeds 170 sprout to become plants, preserving their own kind, and they grow in their proper seasons nourished by what is ordained. Consider as well how the earth has its fixed seasons of rain without which it could not put forth its delightful yield of crops, and animals then would starve for want of proper fodder by which they maintain themselves and renew their kinds. Think how letters make up words: in such a way are different bodies composed of the same elements that they all share and in lack of which none could come into being. Otherwise, why could not nature produce what we dream up— 180 enormous men, so large they can wade across deep oceans or else with their bare hands tear great mountains asunder, and outlasting generations of ordinary life, except for the limitations ordained from the start not merely

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of flesh but of matter itself? We must therefore conclude that nothing can come of nothing and each thing needs some seed from which it can germinate to be brought forth into the air’s gentle breezes. Lastly, we know how tillage is better than barren desert and soil that is worked gives better yields, and from this we can reason back to the start of things 190 that we bring to birth with the earth’s clods broken up and turned by a plowshare’s blade. Otherwise, you would see, without the need for labor, the fruits of the soil pop up on their own and flourish. Consider too how in nature things never disappear but are all resolved again to the elements that first made them. If matter just ceased to exist, then objects at any instant might simply vanish without any need of force to loosen the ties of their parts. But the seeds of things are eternal, and nature does not allow, without some forcible blow that shatters or penetrates, for objects to be destroyed. 200 If we allowed that time could devour matter, then how could Venus restore the races of living things to the earth, bringing each kind again and again to the light of life? And how, when she does, could the earth, that clever contriver, foster its nurslings, providing appropriate sustenance to them all? How do the freshets continue to feed the brooks and springs

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that pour down from afar to replenish the oceans? How does the sky maintain the stars? In time’s infinite stretch of days, how is it that all things we see of mortal body have not been devoured? We take it too much for granted, 210 but these ephemeral beings, blessed with an immortal nature, are somehow replenished over the course of the ages: they cannot— and, indeed, they do not—disappear into non-being. By the same cause would all things without any distinction be destroyed unless matter, itself everlasting, held them through time together enmeshed more closely or less in its bonds; for the slightest touch would suffice for the destruction of things without these particles that are immortal and that make up the world’s body. Some force is needed to sunder their texture and make them dissolve. But since there are bonds that hold these elements together, 220 and since matter is everlasting, things do abide and persist until some force appears that is great enough to disturb them, and then things do not return to nothingness but, disrupted, are reduced to the elements of which they were first composed. Raindrops, when the ethereal father has cast them into the lap of the earthly mother, may pass away, but green

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crops arise from the soil and branches on trees bud with new leaves and later with blossoms and then they bear their fruit. From this we and our kind and other kinds derive 230 our nourishment; from this comes the wealth of cities where children play in the streets and the plenty of country scenes where songbirds frolic in orchards and raise their chicks; from this come flocks and herds that graze and lay their weary, fat bodies upon their pastures’ greenswards to chew the cud or give suck to their young with milk from swollen udders while the kids and calves on the grass gambol on wobbly legs, their hearts made glad by their drinking. And what do these pictures tell us but the fundamental truth that nothing passes away utterly, but nature makes use of it and renews 240 one thing with another? Nothing is born into being unless by this re-deployment of something else that has died. Now that I have explained how nothing can come from nothing and that once a thing is brought forth it cannot return to nothing, let me buttress my case lest you harbor still some doubts and find cause to distrust what I have been expounding, for these minuscule atoms cannot be seen by the naked eye but rather must be understood from inferences that we draw about what must be there, whether we see it or not.

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Imagine a mighty wind that comes up to beat on the ocean 250 to overwhelm huge ships and scatter the clouds in the sky, sweeping along the plains with hurricane force that trees bow down to or rise up to join as their branches fly, and the blasts are so strong that even the mountains shudder. You can feel its fury and hear its savage, threatening howling. You cannot see this wind that roils the sea and sweeps the earth and harries the clouds across the sky’s expanses this way and that, but you do not question that it is there. You’ve seen how water behaves, how gently purling brooks 260 can suddenly rise up, bursting their bonds and wreaking havoc when a deluge of water comes pouring down from the mountains’ melting snows to dash against trees and destroy forests. Not even the strength of stone can withstand its force, and bridges give way to these torrents as they boil about their piers. With an awesome uproar it spreads its terrible devastation, tossing enormous boulders along in its currents and sweeping away whatever may lie in its catastrophic path. In just such a way can the blasts of a mighty wind bring ruin to whatever stands in its way that its eddies scatter, shatter, 270

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and carry off in a moment, the rival of any great river in flood, although no man can see the wind that is surely there. Therefore I say that if wind, although unseen, and water behave in similar ways, then wind as well as water must be possessed of some material body. Think, for that matter, of smell, and how we can discern the various odors of things that we may or may not see, but we are aware of their presence. Consider how we feel scorching heat that we cannot see with our eyes or bitter cold. Likewise, we perceive sounds, which have some substance 280 that we can make out with our senses but cannot behold with our eyes. Nothing can touch or be touched, affect or be affected, unless it be possessed of some kind of physical body. Clothing you hang on a line near the shore in the surf spray will grow damp but these garments spread out in the sun will dry, but nobody sees that dampness pervade them or then, in the heat, disappear, but the water was there in its minuscule particles that the attentive eye could never discern. Over the course of time, the gold on a ring will wear thin by the finger’s flesh, as the constant drip of water 290 will hollow the hardest stone. The curved blade of the plow dwindles down as it works the clods of earth, and the feet of many men will erode the stony pavement of roads. You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways

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that those who pass have touched in greeting, rubbing them thin, and at each of these encounters, some particles must wear off that are far too tiny for our crude eyes to discern. Observe as closely and keenly as anyone can the way things grow in nature—a plant, for example, that adds to itself little by little and over the course of time is clearly 300 larger. Or think of the opposite case, of something that time diminishes—an overhanging rock that the waves of the salt sea gnaw, but you cannot see what is lost at each occasion. We therefore conclude how nature’s workings depend on the actions—and therefore the presence—of bodies that are not seen. On the other hand, it is also true that things in the world are not clumped together in one solid mass, but instead we must suppose there are also voids or empty spaces. This, I think you will find, is a necessary notion, without which you are likely to wander in some confusion— 310 at a loss as to how the world is made and also distrustful of what I am here proposing. There has to be empty space, emptiness that allows for the possible movement of things from one place to another. Otherwise bodies, fixed, could go neither forward nor backward in space that was already filled.

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But things, as you have seen yourself, can move at sea, on land, and across the heights of heaven in various ways. Were there no voids, they could not possibly manage to do this, for matter then would be packed in one continuous mass. This is not to say that solids are not all the same, for some 320 are permeable, as the rocks in certain caves must be to allow the water that oozes through to collect in drops so that the walls are dripping or even appear to weep. Think how in the bodies of living things the food is dispersed to all the parts. Trees grow and put forth their fruits nourished by what the roots take from the soil below that flows up through the trunk and then out through the branches. Sounds can pass through solid walls of rooms in houses, and cold can come through the clothing to permeate to the bones. If there were no voids, no spaces through which these things 330 could somehow manage to pass, you would not see these effects. Finally, why is it true that you see two objects the same in size but different in weight? A ball of wool, for example, weighs less than a ball of lead of exactly the same dimensions. How could this be, if it were not for voids in the ball of wool? The lead is more compact, which gives it that greater heft. We must therefore conclude for such good reasons as these

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that intermingled with matter there must also be voids. But here let me forestall an idea that could be posed as an alternate explanation, lest it should beguile you 340 and lead you away from the truth. Some philosophers argue that water yields to the pressure of the fish in the sea, that it opens before them and closes behind, and from this they generalize to a system in which all things move in and out, exchanging places with one another. It’s possible, is it not? But, no, upon further inspection, it makes no sense whatever, for where would the water go, and from where could it then close back upon itself, and how, in the first place could the fish move at all? For things to move, there must be spaces intermingled with matter and allowing this to happen. 350 Lastly, let us suppose two objects set in motion after a sudden impact, leaping apart . . . What happens? Air comes rushing in to fill the void they make and however quickly that happens, the currents of air that arrive to fill the space cannot do this all at once but must go, as all matter does, from one point to the next. Or do you perhaps suppose, when the objects separate, that the air is somehow compressed? But this cannot be the case,

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for then a void would be made that had not existed before, and a void that had existed would have to have been filled. 360 Besides, the air cannot have its parts compressed that way, withdrawing into itself as a more compact mass. Object however you may, you must at last concede that there is a void in things. Look around at the world and other demonstrations will come to your eye to buttress what I am saying here. For a keen mind like your own it won’t be at all hard. Hounds can follow a trail on a leaf-strewn mountainside once they have picked up a scent. So, too, will you follow the trail of my exposition and see for yourself how logic leads from one thing to the next 370 to draw forth truth from that hidden lair where it hides in the brush. But should you not rise to the task or falter from time to time, I promise you Memmius, friend, to do what I can to whet your appetite for wisdom with melodious speech I pour forth. I will do my utmost to offer bounteous draughts of the treasure stored in my mind, lest age should sap the strength of our limbs and loosen the bonds of our health before I have won you over. But let us return to the task of weaving this web of discourse.

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Everything in nature is made up of two things, for there are, on the one hand, bodies, and then, on the other, 380 voids in which these bodies are and through which they move one way or another. Our common-sense perception declares that every body has its own separate existence, and we must base our belief on what our senses report, for this is the starting point from which our reason proceeds to reconcile and refine and to tease out hidden truths. This is how we arrive at our views of matter and voids, and their logical need if we are to make an account of motion or even an object’s location as we have just now seen. There is nothing else in the world but matter and void: there is no 390 third mode of being in nature. Whatever there is must possess physical properties our senses can report. However small it may be, it will have heft and substance, and, providing that it exists, can be weighed and measured. But if, on the other hand, it is an intangible and empty, allowing things to pass through it at any point or direction, then it must be what we have defined here as a void. If it acts or is acted upon, then it must be a body, but if things can be in it or move through it, then it is a void. But there can be nothing further, no third thing that remains 400

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that our senses can perceive or our reasoning understand. Whatever we call by a name must either be possessed of properties of these two or of accidents of the same. A property is that which can never be separated without a thing’s destruction and dissolution—as weight is a property of stone, or fluidity of water, or touch to a body or intangibility to a void. But slavery or wealth or poverty or freedom or war or peace . . . whatever may come and go while the thing itself remains intact, its nature still the same, 410 these are what we may distinguish as accidents. Time has no independent existence but it derives from things and our sense of what has taken place in the past and come to a close, what is now present, and what is to follow later on. No one could have any sense of time except from things that move and change or else remain still. When men talk of the rape of Helen or speak of the Trojan War, we may wonder how these things may be said to “exist,” for what took place in the past to generations of men that have long ago departed may be classed as accidents 420 of the countries involved or at least the regions where these things happened, for without the people, the substance, the space in which these things

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“took place,” as we say, no fire could have been fanned into flames of love for Tyndareus’s daughter to burn in Paris’s heart and set alight the blaze of savage war; no horse gravid with night-born Greeks could have fooled the sons of Troy. As you see, then, actions—events—do not exist in themselves as a body does or a void, but are accidents of these. The next point is that bodies are partly primordial things and partly formed of the union of these primordial things. 430 Those things which are primal, no power can quench, for they endure, solid, stolid, unchanged. But what, you ask, can they be and where in all creation can such solid bodies be found? The thunderbolts of heaven pass through the walls of houses as sounds can do, and voices; iron turns hot in fire, red and then white; stones in great heat will sunder, as gold will dissolve to liquid in that fire, or icy bronze will yield and melt. You have held in your hands cups wrought of silver and your palms have felt how both heat and cold will pass through the metal from the liquid within. So how can there possibly be such solids 440 when everything seems to change and shift? But let us reason

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and observe more closely and parse what nature’s constraints imply as we expound in these verses how there may be everlasting things with solid perdurable bodies, the seeds and the first beginnings from which all things we see in nature are built. We agreed that nature is two-fold, and whatever there is must be composed of the two dissimilar things, which are bodies and space. Each must exist unmixed, for whatever is empty or void cannot contain any matter. Likewise, what we call matter cannot include voids or empty spaces, for bodies 450 are solid and do not have voids. In any created thing, where there are voids there must be solid matter around them. And, by the same token, reason tells us that voids must have solid matter containing them within it. What we behold in the world is therefore a compound of matter and voids, each of them everlasting and each of them needing the other. Without the voids, the universe would have to be one huge solid. And in the same way, without matter, the world would be all void, vacant, an enormous, empty space. Therefore, without any doubt, through logic, we must conclude, 460 since the world is neither completely full nor yet completely empty, that there must be both matter and empty space, each separate from the other. The bodies cannot be dissolved,

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destroyed by blows from without, nor pierced, nor decomposed from within, nor assailed, nor shivered, as I have already explained, for without voids nothing is crushed or split in two, or shattered, or broken; nothing can let in liquid or cold or heat by which things are destroyed. But the more a thing has voids, the likelier it can be shaken or undone by whatever attacks it. Therefore, if these primordial things are entirely solid 470 and have no voids, they are—and they must be— everlasting. Think of how it would be if this were not the case: if matter were not everlasting, then things long ago would have all returned to nothingness, and whatever we see before us would have been born from nothing—which, as we have agreed, simply cannot happen, for nothing can come from nothing, as what has been created cannot be reduced to nothing. There have to be first beginnings, primordial pieces of matter into which things are resolved at their last moments, units that recombine and from which all new things must arise. 480 These primordial bits are therefore solid, unitary, which is the only way they can have lasted from time’s beginnings through the ages, making each new thing. Go at it another way and think how it would be if nature had not provided a limit to how far things

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could break up or break down. By now, the relentless grinding down of things of all the ages that have gone by would have so far reduced all matter that nothing could be conceived, let alone be brought to birth in the world. It only stands to reason that things will break down faster than they 490 can be built up or than they can be made anew. Those infinite aeons of matter breaking down and dissolving could never be made good, reversed, or repaired again, except for some limitation beyond which nature does not deteriorate—since we see how things persist or even reappear in the world, each after its kind in order to re-attain what we call the flower of life. Now even if matter is solid, still we must give some account of how it can be that certain things in the world are soft— air, for instance, or water, or fire, or, sometimes, earth— 500 and how these are formed and what forces govern the way they behave once void has been intermingled. The contrary idea— of things that were soft from the first beginnings—is hard to defend, for how then would we account for the hardness of flint or iron? Nature would lack that foundation on which creation is based. Solids and single atoms have to exist, which, packed more densely together, can show a greater hardness and strength.

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It also stands to reason that if there were no natural limit to how far things could break down, it would be strange indeed that after an infinite time, bodies of every kind 510 remain and have somehow persisted, never even in danger. For if all things can dissolve, how could they have remained over time everlasting, exposed as all things are to assault? Likewise, there is also a limit set to the size to which things can grow, each true to its own kind and type, and each with a finite lease on existence. So nature decrees what each thing can do and what it cannot. In the world, nothing seems to change and everything proves to be faithful to what was intended: thus, birds in succeeding generations display those same markings by which their kind is distinguished, 520 just as their bodies are made of immutable bits of matter. It would follow, if those primordial bits could be altered or changed or in any way transcended, then consequences would not necessarily follow and anything then could arise from anything. But this does not happen, and each thing has defining limits that order the generations that repeat themselves in nature in the parents’ forms and behaviors. We know there are tiny bits that exist at the very edge of what our senses perceive and can report: and there 530 at that tiniest point, the smallest possible thing exists, without component parts, but a part of something larger, for, lacking in weight or force, it cannot exist alone but must join with other tiny bits to be part of something

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else, another and larger thing to which it adheres, each in its own place, organized and arranged in such a way that these atoms cannot be torn away. These atoms, these first beginnings, are single, solid, small, closely compact, cohering, not made of component parts but strong because unitary and eternal because in nature 540 nothing may tear them down, erode them, or further diminish these minuscule things that persist as the seeds for all that is. Simple logic requires that there be some ultimate smallness, some tiny thing that cannot be further subdivided, otherwise each mote would consist of infinite parts, each of which would of course be divisible yet again into another set of infinite parts, and so on and so on, with no limit to the endless diminution. What difference then would there be between the sum of things and the least of things? Both of them infinite? Both equal? 550 But that is where we should be, with the infinite absolutes of largeness and smallness—but reason rebels against such a notion, and the mind balks. You must, therefore, agree and yield, confessing that there are things that cannot be further reduced to a set of component parts because they are already as small as things can get in nature. These things, then, must exist, these atoms, solid, and everlasting.

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Finally, think how if nature, the great creatrix, had planned for things to be resolved to infinitely tiny parts, then she could not reconstitute from these 560 the things we see around us in all their rich and diverse qualities she achieves by the process of augmentation from the generative matter from which all being derives. Speaking, as we have been, of nature’s need for difference in the seeds of things, let us consider the theory that fire is the source of whatever exists, the original parent substance. This cannot be correct. It was Heraclitus who said so— a famous Greek, but hardly one of their serious thinkers. A lot of those silly Greeks adore rhetorical tricks and mystic pronouncements that may be attractive but never enlighten. 570 That kind of thing is for fools who love what they can’t understand, are impressed by opaque propositions, and suckers for ornate style, whatever fine-sounding phrases tickle their gullible ears. But what he doesn’t and can’t explain is how things are so various here in the world, if they all are descended from fire, pure and simple, for how is fire more or less dense? Are particles of fire, the individual sparks, of the same nature as that which we find in the whole blaze? Are the particles compressed in a hotter and more intense fire? Or contrariwise, when they are dispersed, does it burn 580 with less heat? Or do these questions even apply?

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But you have to suppose some kind of differentiation to account for the wide range of material things in the world, and what can fire do but burn with more or less heat? There is also another problem: we’ve agreed that matter is mixed with voids, but how can it happen that fire can grow more dense and still be left as rare as it is. Believers in fire shrink from these heights and in fear lose the path of truth. Without these voids all things would have to condense and congeal into one solid body from which not even heat 590 or light could escape, as we know happens with any fire, which clearly means that it cannot be packed together this way. In a closer or looser union, fire would be changed and its substance would no longer be fire, in which case there would be no heat or light in the world. Fire would perish to nothing, and it would follow that all things are made of nothing. It also is true that if fire is turned into something else, then fire would perish, no longer be fire, for something must persist in things, or they turn into nothing, in which case the things that are would have to be born of nothing. 600 But surely there are some things that persevere, their nature always the same, no matter how often they come

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and go, transforming themselves, and reviving—and we may be certain that these things cannot be made of fire, agglomerating and fracturing, changing place, and retaining the nature of fire. Whatever came this way would still have to be fire. But I think the truth is this—that there are in the world bodies which, by their positions, relations, motions, and order, can produce fire and which, when their order is changed, change the nature of the thing that they make up together, 610 but they are not like fire nor indeed like anything else that sends out bits to the senses or that we are able to touch. Further, to say that all things are fire and that nothing of all the number of things is real excepting fire as this same person does . . . It strikes me as utter madness, for what he is fighting against is what his own senses tell him, which makes no sense whatever and cuts at the root of belief through which he knows all things—including the thing he calls fire, for what his senses report to him as “fire” is different from everything else that is just as clear to his sight 620 or touch or hearing. He has to be stark staring mad. To what else can we appeal except our senses? What else do we rely upon to distinguish truth from falsehood? Why attempt to deny that everything else is real and only accord that odd honor to fire, rather

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than say that fire too is unreal and doesn’t exist, and then substitute something else and acknowledge its “being”? Whichever side you come down on this question, it’s cuckooland! Therefore, they’re equally wrong: those who think that fire is what all things are made of and the universe itself; 630 those who think that air is the primary element from which all things arise; those who say that water creates all things by itself; or those who opt for earth that somehow by changing itself produces all that there is. They have all strayed from the truth. Similarly those who combine, say, air and fire, or water and earth, or all four of these things together—earth, fire, air, and water. Foremost among the men who speculate in this way is Empedocles, the poet, who lived in Agrigento, in Sicily, that triangular island washed by the green 640 Ionian sea and sprayed by the salty spume of its waves that divide it from the mainland. There is the ruinous whirlpool in which Charybdis lurks, and there is the mighty Etna rumbling its threats that it sometimes makes good with flame that bursts forth from the depths of the earth to hurl to the skies its flickering tongues of fire. This island boasts of many great wonders that people come from all over the world to see and admire. It is a fertile place and stocked with many fine men, and yet it can boast of nothing greater,

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finer, or more sacred than that this man lived here— 650 Empedocles, whose poems speak in a loud clear voice the thoughts of an adventurous mind that seems to transcend what we have always thought was the limit of mortal men. My admiration for him is all but boundless, and still, although there is much in his thought and work that merits praise, as there is, indeed, in the work of men who are less than he, but still in their various ways, rich and even inspired in their vision of things as they gave their explanations and answers that seemed to come from a source at least as holy and far more sure than the Delphic priestess sitting upon her tripod 660 pronouncing the words we suppose must come from Apollo, yet all these eminent thinkers and writers stumble and fall when they address the question of how things came to be. Great as they were, so too were their falls from correctness great. Think how they all assume motion and yet do not allow for voids in which such motion would have to take place. They propose, instead, some softness and rarefaction, so air and sun and water and earth can mix and mingle in beasts and crops—and yet without any voids in their bodily structures. Think also how they place no limit upon the division 670 of parts into smaller parts or fixed point beyond which nothing can be further reduced; in other words,

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they deny that there is an extreme point beyond which, as our senses tell us, there can be no further breaking down. We have already reasoned that just as there is a minimal point below which things cannot be perceived by the senses, so there must be a least extreme in what we cannot perceive but that nevertheless exists invisibly in nature. And then, in the third place, think how they assume that the first beginnings in nature are soft, which is to say 680 entirely perishable—and thus must return to nothing, which of course means that things must also arise from nothing. We have agreed that both these views have to be wrong. Furthermore, these things are incompatible, hostile, poison one to another, so that when they come together they perish or fly apart, as when in a gathering storm we see the thunderbolts and the wind and rain contending. Besides, if from these four things the rest are created and then resolved again into the four from which they came, how can one say that they are the first beginnings? 690 As easy to look at the process the other way and say that from all the things that exist, four elements result. These four are begotten, one after another, and change their color and their nature, each giving way to the next in an endless, timeless progression. If you suppose that fire and earth and airy wind and water can come together without changing the nature of each of them, you will see that it can’t happen, and nothing, animate or not,

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beast or tree, can arise—for each of the elements mixes only in discord with the others, and each will show 700 its persistent nature. Air and earth, or fire and water, cannot abide one another. But primal beginnings must be things that have a secret and unseen nature that nothing can thwart or check from its proper being while it combines to make whatever is being made in the world we see. Those who propose this theory maintain that the start is in heaven and heaven’s fire which somehow turns itself into air from the breezes of which is born the water of rain—and from that earth is created. And then? All things return from earth, to water, to air, and then to the heat of the first fire. 710 What they are saying, then, is that this process continues forever, back and forth, in their path from heaven to earth and from earth back to the stars of the firmament in heaven. But first-beginnings by no means ought to behave this way. It has to be that something abides, always the same, and that all things should not be emerging and then disappearing, for whenever a thing changes into something else, or passes out of its own nature, there is a kind of death of what it was before. Thus, the famous four elements we have been discussing are, by this 720 account, changing and passing away, which means they must be made of something else, must consist of something that doesn’t

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have to change. Otherwise, the conclusion we could come to is that all things return to absolute nothingness. Better by far to assume that bodies are endowed with such a nature that they can produce, say, fire, but with only a few rearrangements, something added or removed, they can make winds of the air or whatever, interchanging in a way that comports with reason and what we perceive around us. But the counterargument is that we can see how living 730 things grow into the air from out of the nourishing earth and need the rain in its proper season from the melting clouds in the skies above them, where the grateful trees shake their limbs, now in the rainstorms and now in the heat of the sun whose fire fosters them and the crops about them, and beasts that cannot otherwise grow and thrive. And this is true. Who can deny that we need solid food to eat and liquid water to drink, without both of which we should lose the flesh that clothes our bones, and our lives would leach away? There can be no question that we ourselves are helped and nourished 740 by certain fixed things, as others are as well by other fixed things. There are many first beginnings we all have in common, commingled in various ways and nourished according to their kinds. It is often of great importance with what and in what relation these first beginnings cohere

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together and how they move and how they receive one another, for the same beginnings make up the sky, the sea, the earth, the flowing rivers, the sun overhead, and also our crops, our trees, and the beasts too—but differently mixed and in different ways. Look at these lines of mine, with the same letters 750 arranged in differing patterns to make the words and the phrases, but sharing the same characters. But the meanings are clear, I hope, and have different sounds: so, too, can elements mix, the same units that do not change in an order that always is new. The elemental parts of the world, the unchanging beginnings of things, do this as well, producing variety, difference, so that from them all the various wonders we see are brought forth. Now let us turn to the subject of Anaxagoras’s text, the Homoeomeria.1 This is the Greek name, clearly, for Latin does not have the richness of Greek, although one may surely explain 760 in the words of our mother tongue the ideas that he proposes. What the Homoeomeria says is that bones, for example, are made 1. The Greek means “made up of like parts.”

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of tiny little bones, and flesh likewise is made from teeny-weeny bits of flesh, and blood is made when many little droplets of blood unite together. Gold, he thinks, consists of many small grains of gold, and earth is an agglomeration of little earths, as fire is of tiny fires, and water of drops of water, and so on and so on. But he does not allow voids anywhere in things, or place any limits on how 770 fine things may be cut up. And I think he is just as wrong as all those others whose views we have taken pains to present. His first beginnings are weak and if indeed they are the primary things endowed with a similar nature to what they produce, then, like them, they must also suffer change and pass away, for nothing holds them back from the same ruin as that which affects their larger complex productions. How will these things endure under the pressures of nature, escape from death, and somehow elude the teeth of destruction? Fire? Water? Air? Which of these? Or blood 780 or bone? Not one, I think, when everything is alike. These beginnings will be as mortal as what we see with our eyes, vanquished by the same violence and passing away. But as we have discussed and I have proved, things cannot fall away into nothing, as they cannot grow from nothing. In any event, since food is what nourishes our bodies, we realize that muscle and bone and veins and blood are made up of parts that in no way are anything like themselves,

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unless you suppose that foods of all kinds are themselves made up of little bodies of sinew and bone and veins and blood, 790 and that all food and drink is composed of things that are quite unlike what they appear, but have in them commingled flesh and blood and bone and mucus and even pus. And our food grows out of the earth, which ought to mean that the earth is not what we think but consists of things that are somehow like food. Apply this logic to other cases and see the results that are equally strange—that fire and smoke and ashes are hidden in wooden logs, which therefore must be unlike themselves but must consist of things that are altogether different and arise out of the wood. Whatever bodies the earth 800 nourishes and makes grow {must consist of unlike things which in turn contain yet other unlike ingredients.}2 To be fair, there is a loophole that Anaxagoras uses when he supposes that all things are somehow intermingled and hidden within one another. What appears and we see is what preponderates and therefore comes to the fore. But only a little thought will reveal the flaws of this theory, for if it were true then corn under the crushing weight of the turning millstone would bleed or reveal one of those other 2. The lines in curly brackets are missing in the mss. These follow Cyril Bailey’s reasonable guess.

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substances that nourish and build our bodies. But no, 810 not a drop of blood oozes onto the miller’s floor. In the same way one could expect from the grass sheep graze on or else from the water they drink sweet drops of a milk-like substance that comes from the udders of fleecy ewes. Or from clods of earth, when you have crumbled them fine, you ought to see small signs of plants’ seeds or leaves. Or when wood is shaved or sanded there ought to be traces of smoke and ashes and little fires— but as a plain matter of fact we know that this doesn’t happen and that, instead, there must be seeds, common to all, and intermingled with all the things that arise from them. 820 And what could be the possible counterargument? Say that sometimes on mountaintops in the branches of tall trees that a strong wind rubs together, flowers of flame will blossom, and they blaze up together. But is it the “ignis” buried there in the “lignis,” the flame at the heart of all wood? There are many things that can burn and whose seeds of heat spark and then burst into flame when they are rubbed together, and if flame were hidden in all the trees of the woodlands, they

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would burst forth to consume the trees and the whole forest. I have already discussed the importance of how we think 830 of the first beginnings of things and how they are held together, what motions they give and take, and how the same elements, changed slightly in their relation, create both fires and trees. Just as the letters that make the words can change—from fir to fire—the things they name can also change and be changed. What it comes down to is this: if you think that whatever you see in the visible world cannot come into being without some earlier form of similar nature, then it must follow that the laughter this argument ought to engender will shake you with great side-splitting guffaws until, all but helpless, you find 840 salt tears running down your cheeks and wetting your face. Now pay attention. I’ll try to be clear. I know these things are difficult and obscure, but I am full of the hope of fame: it’s as if the thyrsus of Dionysus had struck my mind, even as my love of the Muses urged me onward to attempt untrodden paths on the heights of their sacred mountain. I love to discover fresh springs that nobody else has drunk from, to pluck new flowers and weave a chaplet for my brow from fields where no one has ever ventured before and the Muses

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have never recognized with this token of novel achievement. 850 What I’m writing about, after all, is of very high importance as I proceed to loosen the ligatures of religion. The subject is also demanding of the clarity only the Muses’ grace can give—which doesn’t seem, after all, out of place. Think of how doctors will give young patients bitter concoctions but first touching the rim of the cup with a drop of honey to try to beguile the lips and the tongue so that the child may drink down the nasty juice of the wormwood or whatever, deluded but not betrayed, for the motive is to do him good and restore him to health. Just so, it is my intention 860 to set forth my argument in sweet Pierian song, touching it with the drops of the Muses’ sweetest honey the better to engage your mind with hexameter verses so that you may discover the world and how it is made, and come to a better understanding of the true nature of things. We had been talking about how the bodies of matter are solid, forever flying about and entirely unimpeded. Let us now examine the question of whether or not there is any limit to these pieces of matter, and then whether there is also a limit to the spaces, 870 the voids in which the basic bits exist and move. In other words, what I ask is whether space is finite or extends forever without measure in height and breadth. The universe, one must reason, has no external limit,

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for if it did then clearly there would have to be something beyond it, something from which its border was a separation—but that would also have to be part of the universe. Our reason tells us, therefore, that beyond the sum of things there cannot be something else, something further, and we are then forced to conclude that the universe is without any limit or end, and no matter 880 what point it may be that you happen to occupy, it is true that there is, extending in every direction, infinite space. Or let us consider the question in another way, supposing that in infinite space some person managed to get to the furthest limit and then somehow threw a flying lance beyond . . . Where does it go? Is there any “beyond” or does something block it? You must choose one or the other, and neither makes any sense, and compels you, then, to admit that the universe extends endlessly, for either there is an edge that prevents the lance from flying further or somehow makes it bounce back, 890 or else the edge turns out not really to be an edge, and whatever place you pick as your furthermost limit is not that at all. It doesn’t exist anywhere, and the flight of the weapon can never escape into even more distant space.

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It also stands to reason that if all space stood within boundaries on all sides with fixed limits, then matter with its solid weight would have run together, collecting somewhere at the bottom, and under heaven’s capacious awning nothing could ever happen—nor could heaven itself exist, nor even the light of the sun, because all matter would lie 900 in a dense heap having sunk from the very beginning of time. But that hasn’t occurred, and won’t, and matter does not come to rest that way, but the world’s business keeps on going with incessant motion in every part with the elements of matter supplied from infinite space. We look at the landscape and see how one thing limits another: between the hills and mountains is air, and around the sea there is earth, or if you will, the sea marks the land’s end. But the universe is different, without any outer limit. Therefore, the extent and the depths of space are so great 910 that not even quickest lightning bolts can traverse it all even though they hurtle onwards through endless time, for no matter how far they go in any direction, they cannot reduce the length they have yet to travel in endless space. And nature also withholds any limits from matter because of the way she requires a body to be surrounded by void and also demands that the voids be surrounded by bodies. It is by this alternation that she makes the universe infinite, for bodies or voids, without each other, would by themselves extend without any end or limit. 920

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{If we imagine space as infinite, it could not contain infinite matter; but if matter itself were finite,} neither sea nor land nor the shining realms of the sky nor the race of men, nor even the bodies of gods could stand still for the shortest part of an hour—for that hoard of matter, driven abroad from its union would rush, dissolved through the huge void, or rather say that it never could in the first place have been compacted to any kind of form, because, scattered so widely, it never could have been brought together. It stands to reason that all those first beginnings could not 930 have placed themselves by design, each knowing where it went and each endowed with an intellect, nor did they somehow agree what motions they should produce, but because they were so many and moving so many ways, they were harried and set into motion with infinite collisions so that, in a random way, having tried every kind of motion and combination, they came at last into such arrangements as the sum of things is made of. And this is what has lasted through many years and aeons, for once these elements came together in their compatible patterns and motions, they produced a system in which 940 rivers replenish the ever greedy seas with their water,

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and earth, in the heat of the sun, renews its generous yield. So do the generations of living beings spring up— which they could by no means do unless there were somewhere a great store of matter that rose up from the infinite to replace in due season whatever is lost. To understand this, think of how an animal, deprived of food, will starve, wasting away and losing its body without the supply of matter. So it is with all things: they dissolve as soon as they are deprived of matter that is somehow 950 turned away from its normal course and no longer provided. There are also external assaults from every direction, but these cannot keep together the whole of each made thing where the pieces have come together in union, for, though they smite it, again and again, and may keep some construction in place, yet in the passage of time others arise and the sum is made good once again. Sometimes the bombarding atoms may bounce off and give to the first beginnings the time and space to escape so that they can fly clear of the combination in which they formerly made up a part. 960 And this is how it goes, with things rising up in great numbers, and indeed, for the very bombardment of atoms there needs to be

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an infinite supply of matter on every side. Now there is a certain theory that some have proposed but you, my dear Memmius, must by all means avoid: it claims that all things tend to the center and that for this reason the world stands firm and holds together without external buffets, the highest and lowest as well unable to be set free because of this constant pressure, this tendency toward the middle. In other words, the world is standing upon itself, 970 with whatever is beneath the earth pressing upwards to find an equipoise upside down—like images reflected on the surface of clear water. These people also maintain that animals there walk somehow with their heads downward and cannot fall from the earth into the sky’s heights any more than our own bodies can fly up into heaven; and that when they see the sun, we are looking at stars of the night; and that they share the seasons with us in turn, just as they have night time when it is bright day for us. But this is absurd and false, and only the stupid can think 980 that such twisted reason is plausible and embrace it. If indeed there really were a middle, could things stand still there at all, rather than instantly fly away— for an altogether different reason. All places and spaces, which we call voids, must yield a passage through that middle (or not-middle) equal to weights, whatever their movements.

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Besides, there cannot be a place where bodies arrive and lose the force of weight, standing still in a void; nor can a void support anything with weight, but as its nature commands and desires, it yields place 990 to bodies. Therefore, things cannot possibly be combined together in that way, yearning for some middle. And in any event, they do not suppose that all bodies press toward the middle that way, but only earth and water— the sea’s liquid that pours down from the high mountains and such things as are held within the frame of earth. But then they try to account for the thin breezes of air and the flickering tongues of fire that are carried up from the middle. And they cannot explain how the sky twinkles with constellations and the sun’s fire feeds through the blue sky, because all 1000 heat flees from the middle and gathers itself up there. And what about the tops of the trees that could not sprout leaves without the food that they get pouring up from the earth, supplied by some internal fire. Their reasoning breaks down . . . {If fire and air tend to move upward, then there’s a danger} lest the walls of the world are suddenly dissolved and fly apart after the fashion of flames in a void with everything else comporting in like manner, the sky’s thunder rushing upwards, and the earth slipping away from under our feet amid ruin of sky and everything else, 1010 their elements scattering out into an empty abyss

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so that in one moment nothing is left behind but empty space and invisible atoms rushing about, for in whatever part you assume that these particles first shall be lacking, that will be the very gate of death for all things, and that will be how the mass of all the matter we see around us is dispersed into nothingness. So, you will gain a most thorough understanding of all these subtle matters, led on with only a little effort, for as one thing becomes clear in your mind, it lights the way to the next so that night’s blindness cannot obscure your path or prevent your progress as you peer deep into nature’s depths as each found truth shines the way to the next.

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How lovely it is, when the winds lash the great sea into huge waves that beset sailors, to gaze out from dry land at the tribulations of others—not that we wish them ill, but we realize how free we are from the troubles they face. How lovely, too, to behold soldiers on some wide field maneuvering this way and that and fighting their fears of impending pain and death, upon which we look down from some safe sanctuary. So too, with these philosophical battles we delight to view from our lofty post, fortified by the wisdom of great men: how the others, advancing, retreating, blind 10 and apparently aimless, seek the correct path of life. The struggles of wit with wit, the argumentation, the endless jockeying for position and influence, the quest 48

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for power and riches . . . Poignant and pitiable, these men, so keenly blind in the perilous murk in which they pass their little span of time, without understanding that nature calls out from every side directing our attention to the simple truth—that pain should be kept away from our bodies, and our minds, protected from fear and dread, should seek delight! We all know that the body’s needs are modest and few: it wants not to suffer pain and it likes things that feel good. Nature’s greatest gifts are simple. She does not care for fancy decorations, gilded torchères in the shape of human arms that light long corridors that lead to grand salons where nightly revels take place. She does not delight in elaborate gewgaws, garnitures of silver and gold, or paneled crossbeams overhead that resound from the plucked strings of the lyre. She has no need to improve on the simple pleasures of friends stretched out on a grassy knoll beneath the arching branches of living trees near water purling in some brook. What riches can equal that? Let it be spring when the weather is perfect and flowers bloom, punctuating the meadow with various colors. The body’s aches and fevers flee no quicker on purple couches in tapestried chambers than under a poor man’s ragged blanket.

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What good then is wealth? How can our hoards of treasure help us or in any way protect our bodies? Or noble birth? Or royalty, even? What good can they possibly do for us, in body or even in mind? Assume that you’re sitting in some reviewing stand while your legions maneuver across the Campo 40 in mock warfare with the units disposed and the cavalry massed, all in glittering armor, and cheering on cue and saluting . . . Does any of this reassure you? Drive out your fears and suspicions? Do you no longer worry about real warfare and the danger of unsheathed weapons? You mingle with kings and mighty princes, the world’s movers and shakers, and none of their gold protects them in life’s continuing struggle as much as logical thinking and the certain truths of reason. Children quake in the darkness imagining dream monsters, and we, in the light of day, are every bit as fearful of insubstantial chimeras. 50 Our nighttime terrors cannot be calmed by the rays of the sun but only by the study of nature’s constant laws. Now, listen as I explain how the generative bodies move to produce the array of the things we see, and then dissolve them again and what the forces are that constrain their motions as they travel so swiftly through the great

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void. Pay close attention and understand my words. We have already agreed that matter is not one packed and coherent lump, since we see how, over the course of time, things will tend to diminish, enfeebled by age and ebbing 60 away before our eyes. And yet the sum of matter remains nonetheless the same—for as bodies pass away from one thing they diminish by leaving, they then increase another to which they go: the first fades away and the second grows and blossoms. And yet the bodies do not linger there but then pass on to something else, in an endless renewal so that the sum of things remains constant. Creatures depend on each other, and some species increase while others wane and diminish. In a fairly short span of time we can see how generations of living creatures are born 70 and die, but the race goes on as the runners pass the torch of life, one to the next, different and yet the same. Now, if you suppose that the first beginnings of things could remain immobile and yet beget new motions in things, you would come to realize that this idea must be mistaken, for as these atoms wander this way and that through the void, they are either carried forward by their own weight and inertia, or else must have been bumped by some chance blow from another atom with which it collided, so that two of them leap

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apart in different directions. This would be the result 80 of the meeting of two such objects, hard and perfectly solid, since there is nothing constraining or obstructing them from behind. It also helps to remember that all the bodies of matter are constantly tossed around this way, and there is no bottom, no place in the sum of things to which they can come to rest since space is without any limit and therefore has no end. I have, you will recall, proved beyond all doubt that space is without measure and extends in all directions. It necessarily follows that in this limitless void atoms can never come to rest but must ceaselessly move 90 in all directions, pressed together and bouncing apart— to a very great distance or else in some narrow confinement. Those that are pressed together in close combination, collide and then leap back in the tiniest intervals, held tight in the complex shape of which they make up a part, as in stone or iron and other objects we take to be solid. The rest wander about through the huge void, leaping apart and then, after a long passage of time, returning. This is what happens in air, or the gleaming light of the sun, and there are others too that wander about in the void, 100 not part of any dense combination, perhaps unable

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to have entered to join and attune their individual motions. I am not making this up: you’ve seen it yourself. Just think of the image before your eyes you’ve witnessed time and again when the rays of the sun are streaming into a darkened room and you perceive in the air the little motes that dance in their light—or is it a struggle, like troops on a huge field driven this way and that by commands we can only imagine, coming together and flying apart? Take that as an image for how the atoms dance or are tossed around in the empty 110 void, a good example of what goes on everywhere and a key to our better understanding of how things work. There is another reason to pay attention to such phenomena as the busy dance of motes in the air, for such turmoil shows the secret of unseen motion in all matter. Look and extrapolate from what you see in the air to what goes on with all matter, the atoms bouncing off one another, changing direction, hurled this way and that. This restlessness is what they inherit and still show from their first beginnings, for those atoms moved by themselves, 120 and these small aggregations, these early descendants, are still set moving by the same unseen forces that affected their first forebears,

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but these, which are larger, show more clearly to our gross senses in the light of the sun the same primitive forces at work, although we cannot observe the collisions of the atoms and their constant bouncings away that are going on all the time. Now, Memmius, this swiftness of all these bits of matter you will understand at once, if you follow my argument here. Consider how in the early morning the dawn comes on with its light that spreads out on the earth, and the birds flutter above 130 and fill the air of the pathless woodlands with their singing. The coming of the light from the risen sun is sudden, and the world is flooded at once with the brightness of its rays, but its heat comes rather more slowly, for it does not pass through a void but its particles must beat their way through the waves of the air, and they do not do this alone but linked and massed together, and therefore are further slowed, obstructed by one another, and they make their way at a lesser speed than the light of the sun. But the atoms which are solid and single and pass through a void are not in that way delayed from without, and, being units 140

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that cannot be divided, they move exceedingly quickly, at a greater speed than light as they go from point to point as they are propelled faster than even the light of the sun, crossing an even wider space than it takes the flashing sunlight to cross the heavens and make its way to us.* . . . nor to follow up on each one of these several first beginnings that they may understand in what way things are done. There are those who disagree, who of course know nothing at all of matter and still believe that without the power of gods nature cannot attend to its business, changing the seasons, 150 producing crops, and the rest of what goes on in the world— so, for them, it is only divine pleasure that leads men and women to Venus for whom they perform the rite that begets the generations in order that the race may not die out. They imagine the gods looking down, arranging all this for us, but their flights of imagination leave all reason behind. I may or may not be right in my theory of first beginnings, but I have no doubt whatever that I can show how heaven has nothing at all to do with the way nature is made and how it behaves. It is too full of grave imperfections 160 * There is a lacuna here of more than fifty lines, almost certainly another argument for the speed of atoms, and perhaps describing how atoms form the world and everything in it.

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for anyone to credit—or blame—the divine powers. I will, I promise, Memmius, return to this subject later, but now I shall return to my unfinished subject, motion. Let us here consider the question of whether a body can of its own force be carried or move upwards. Do not let yourself be deceived by the case of flames, or, indeed, of burgeoning crops and trees that increase and grow upwards. It still holds true that anything with weight tends downwards. Fires, do, indeed, leap up even to the roofs of houses as they devour 170 lofty rafters and beams. But is this of their own will or are they propelled upwards by some driving force, as, for example, when blood comes spurting out of a body spraying high and scattering gore? And water too will splash all the higher the more we push on it downwards, even with the force of many men together and then it will vomit back up in an irresistible gush. Yet we have no doubt that, left to themselves, these things are all inclined to fall downwards through an empty void. So it is that flame, squeezed at the bottom by air, 180 must rise up, even though of its own weight it would fall. You have seen in the nighttime skies the torches of flame with their long trails of fire and how they plummet to the earth. By day the rays of the sun disperse in all directions and sow the fields with light, which means that the sun’s heat, too, tends downward. Lightning crosses the skies from the rain clouds and its bolts

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constantly strike downward from their heights to the earth below. And yet it cannot be altogether that simple, for atoms, as they are carried down through the void by their own weight do not proceed in an absolutely unswerving line 190 but apparently must wiggle, swerving sometimes from their course and changing their direction—for if they fell like raindrops through the emptiness of space there would be no collisions, no blows that they could exchange with one another, and therefore no occasion for nature to produce more complex structures. Now if anyone supposes that heavier elements fall faster than lighter ones through the void and in that way deal the blows that are needed to produce these combinations, he departs from logical thinking. It may be true that in water or air, the heavier objects may speed their descent, because water 200 and air cannot delay or deter at an equal rate but yield to the greater force of the heavier object. Still, in an empty void there is nothing to give support or resistance at any time, but the space gives way as its nature requires. Objects, therefore, fall at an equal speed although they are of unequal weight through an unresisting void. And if this is true, then heavier bodies do not collide as they fall upon the lighter, nor do they bump one another to begin the processes by which nature creates.

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It must then stand to reason that they wiggle, if only a little, 210 with the least possible divagations. But do you suggest an oblique movement, perhaps? No, that cannot be, for weights, when you drop them, fall with the straightness of plumb-lines, or at least as far as we are able to tell. But do they swerve, if only a little, from their perpendicular fall? Consider, too, the peculiar implications: if motion is one uninterrupted chain, each new one the result of something that went before, predictable and constrained, decreed, as it were, by fate, with cause following cause infinitely forward and backward, where would you find 220 free will in living creatures everywhere on earth? But each creature displays an unpredictable nature wrested somehow from the fates, so that we go this way or that, at our pleasure or whim, not at fixed times and places, but as our minds dictate! And each thing has its will, or say that there is a mind that sets its limbs in motion. You have seen, I am sure, at the track, when they open the starting gate that even the swift horses cannot burst forth as quickly as the mind would have them do. There is an instant’s pause in which the mass of their matter must be stirred up by the thought 230 of the great effort that mind dictates to muscle and bone. In that split second you see how movement begins with a thought

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that passes then to the will and then to the body and limbs. It is altogether different when the horse on the track is jostled, and one body is impelled by a blow from another, for then the body is propelled against its will, and the mind’s business is to curb it and regain its earlier poise. In the crowd, leaving the races, we may be jostled and pushed, as the fans hurry along headlong, and we fight to resist the force of the massed bodies. So it is with matter, 240 which is also at times compelled to yield to external force to which it responds with its own steadying inclination. This can explain how atoms behave as well, their motions having some source and cause beyond the blows they receive, and this is the power we all share, for we have agreed that nothing can come from nothing. Weight is what prevents all things arising from such collisions as we have described. But the mind and its freedom fend off the necessity of actions and keep us from being determined and dominated, enduring and suffering merely, and not imposing our own desires— 250 that minute swerving of atoms, beginning at no fixed place and occurring in no particular pattern of space or time.

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It has always been this way: the mass of matter was never more closely packed together or more widely dispersed, for nothing can increase or diminish it. That motion with which all atoms began, they still display, from ages in the murky past to those that are still in the hazy future. What once was born will be born again in the same way, and grow with as much strength as the laws of nature grant. Nor can any power change the sum of things that are, 260 for where could anything go to get away, and from where could anything new come bursting in to add or change the sum of things or alter its ongoing motions? I acknowledge that you may wonder why, if these atoms always move, then the world we live in, their sum total, appears nevertheless to remain in utter stillness, except for something—or some body—that may move in our field of vision. The answer is that the nature of these first beginnings is hidden from our imperfect senses. And because you cannot see them you cannot, of course, perceive that they are in constant motion. 270 This is especially true with objects at any distance. You have looked, have you not, at a meadow where wooly sheep are grazing, and the little lambs are playing, butting heads in fun. But from the veranda on which you sit, it is all a blur,

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as apparently still as a pastoral mural someone had put there. So too when powerful legions maneuver out on some field in their war games and the shine of their polished armor flashes to rival the sky’s brightness, and the ground itself quakes at the tramp of their massed feet so that the mountains echo the rumble to frighten the stars above, and the horsemen gallop 280 this way and that, shaking the plain with their hoof beats, still there is a distant vantage point from which their drill seems to be frozen in time, motionless and silent. Now let us turn our attention to the fascinating subject of how far the various atoms differ in shape and form. Some are endowed with a similar morphology, but often they are altogether different—and this is hardly surprising, seeing as how there are so many of them. The supply is, one may say, quite endless. And out of this infinite number we should expect to find a great many shapes and sizes. 290 Look at the race of men, or schools of scaly fish, or herds of cattle, or packs of wild beasts in the forest, or the flocks of birds that throng the banks of brooks and ponds or call back and forth in the pathless woods. Examine them closely. and you will find that each of the members of these groups

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differs, if only slightly, from all the others’ appearance. Look at any of these with care, and you will discover subtle differences in shape or size or appearance. How else could a newborn know its mother? Or how could the mother distinguish her own offspring? But we see that they can do this, 300 and they know one another as clearly as men do. Think of a shrine where a calf has been slain on the altar, the smells of gore and incense mixing together. The mother, bereaved, wanders the meadow searching the greensward for any trace of the cloven hoof of her dear calf. She surveys, looking everywhere for the lost creature and fills the air with grievous lowing and wailing, and again and again she returns to the stall, each time with hopes that are always disappointed. And the tenderest willow branches she spurns, and the freshest fodder, grass still wet with the dewdrops. Nothing can divert or delight her troubled mind 310 or lighten her burden of woe. The sight of the other happy calves in the pasture cannot lessen her grief as she mourns her own, her only child that she knows so well and seeks without respite. Think of the tender kids that know their own mothers, or bleating wobbly lambs that find almost always the right ewe with the right udder to satisfy their urgent demands and nature’s too.

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Finally, look at an ear of corn, and the individual kernels, which may resemble one another but are not quite the same, with variations in shape among them. 320 Or go for a walk on the beach and look at the thousands of shells the waves have piled up along the curving shore and try to find even two that match exactly, point for point. Therefore I say that with atoms, since they are parts of nature and are not made by hand after some bench model, differ among themselves as they fly about the world. We can also deduce by the work of the mind how fire is not always the same, but that of a lightning bolt is finer, with a more penetrating nature than what arises from torches, for heavenly fire is made of smaller bits and passes 330 through openings far smaller than our wood or charcoal fires are able to do. Light will pass through a horn lantern but raindrops won’t. How can this happen? It has to be that the bodies of light, the photons, are smaller than the atoms that go to make up water. Or, to be more domestic, wine will easily pass through a fine sieve, but the oil pressed from olives lags and goes through the holes more slowly, or else it must be that their first beginnings are more closely entangled together so that they cannot detach themselves to ooze more freely through the apertures of the strainer. 340

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It may even be that the atoms of honey and milk, which are pleasing in the mouth and on the tongue are smooth and round, while those that make up such things as wormwood or red centaury that cause our mouths to twist in displeasure are sharp or somehow hooked so that they attack our taste buds and tear their way into our receptors to disturb by this harsh intrusion. Finally, consider how some things are pleasing to touch while others are rough and unpleasant, made up of atoms in conflict or else of dissimilar shapes. We hear how a saw will rasp and grate, while the harp or the lute are not at all so strident 350 but as smooth as the airs a musician plucks with his skillful fingers from their vibrating well-tuned strings. It is the discord of atoms that causes the noisome smell when corpses are being burned, while when a theater stage is sprinkled with orange saffron gathered in Corcyra, or an altar is perfumed with incense from Arabia, there is a lovely odor that arises somehow from the harmony of their component atoms. You must also grant that some colors are more pleasant than others, and those we prefer are made up of agreeable atoms, while others that grate on the senses and are ugly 360

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arise from other kinds and shapes of first beginnings. We like what soothes the senses and comes from atomic smoothness, while what disturbs or offends must be produced by their roughness. There are also some which are neither perfectly smooth nor yet too sharp, perhaps with hooks or acute angles that do not hurt but still can cause an itch or a little tickle, as with the lees of certain wines or with fresh endive. Hot fire and cold frost can also affect our sense of touch, which is the holy power the gods possess and of the five our most intimate, fundamental 370 connection with the world. Pierced from without, we feel hurt, or within the body, when something goes wrong we respond with pain. Or pleasure, too, can arise from the sense of touch, as Venus knows, who presides over acts of love and gives us the delight of ejaculations. The range is great, as you know, and at a blow the atoms riot within the body and confuse our senses by having been so rudely disturbed. With your own hand, strike smartly some part of your body and see for yourself. It must be that these atoms have different shapes to produce these different results and varying sensations. 380 In those objects in the world that we would describe as hard,

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the atoms must be closely set or interconnected, knitted together perhaps by some branch-like protrusions. Diamonds, for instance, are harder than anything else and scorn blows from other objects. Stone, and bronze, and iron also are hard. You can hear the shriek of the bronze sockets resisting the bolts. Other, softer things, like liquids, must be made of smoother and rounder atoms. Think of a handful of poppy seeds you can scoop up with your hand as easily as you would take up a like measure of water. 390 The individual seeds are round and do not obstruct one another. A poppy seed if you touch it will roll downhill exactly the way that water will. And fire must also be made of rounded particles, dispersing the way it does with clouds of smoke and the hot flames flying in all directions to sting the eyes and to split the nearby stones that they penetrate by their atoms’ smoothness and lack of any entanglements that would hamper their movements. It would follow, too, that with what our senses tell us is sharp and spiky, there must be particles in it that are sharp 400 but not at all entangled—like brine from the sea, that is bitter but clearly a liquid. This must mean that the round and smooth parts are intermingled with sharp, not hooked together, or that the rounded parts are rough rather than smooth

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so that they can roll but can also cause us pain. Indeed, one can demonstrate with Neptune’s brine how the rough and the smooth can be separated, so that the salt is removed as when you filter the water several times through earth and what at last runs into the pit has left behind its nauseous brine and what collects is potable water. 410 It has left the sharper atoms behind it in the earth and only the smooth have managed to come through the filtration.* Now that I have explained this, I will connect it with another truth that we can infer—that these first beginnings have only a limited number of possible shapes they can take. Constrained as they are by their small size, there can only be so many possible ways they can differ one from another. Let us suppose for the sake of argument that there are three smallest parts of an atom, or make that four or five: how many ways can you rearrange those constituent pieces 420 without repeating yourself? Top or bottom or middle, or left or center or right, shuffle and then reshuffle, reorder them how you will, you soon find repetitions. The only way to introduce some novel arrangement * There are some who believe that there is a gap here, because part of the argument seems to be missing. Bailey, more cautious, simply attributes this deficiency to the unfinished state of the poem.

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is by bringing in new pieces to vary your results, but here we come up against the practical limit of size. So an infinite number of shapes would surely have to imply atoms of infinite size, which cannot possibly be. Look at the world we live in, with extravagant colors, the blazing purples of Thessaly, dyed from the seashells they find on their shores, 430 or the gold of peacocks’ tails that they fan wide to attract their mates, all these and more would fade away to drabness compared with the new colors that would surely appear in the world if there were not some limitation on atoms’ sizes and shapes. The odors of honey or myrrh would be nothing at all to remark about, and the song of the swan would fade away to a sorry silence, or even Apollo’s gift of music and the miracle of strings musicians pluck on their lyres would be totally overwhelmed by these new hyperaesthetic experiences we cannot even imagine from new 440 things that might arise in the world. Or else all things would revert to a dullness and drabness, changing not for the better but, as is also possible, for the meaner: the world could be worse, and ugliness would be everywhere to see and smell, taste and hear. But this is not at all the case, and for such good reason we have to suppose a certain

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limit set for all atoms and the things they combine to make, for none of us expects either a sudden improvement or deterioration. With limits, the world is what it is. Turn your attention now to the question of heat and cold 450 and how there is a range from the fiery spells of the tropics to the icy frosts of the north, with warmth somewhere in the middle. There is a gradual range, which suggests how things in nature differ by degrees, with extreme points the stylus marks at either end of ice and the tongues of fire. Now that I have explained this, I will proceed to connect it with another truth that we can infer—that these first beginnings that are made of similar shape are infinite in number. If the difference among the shapes is limited, then it follows that if atoms of similar shape were limited too, then the sum 460 could not be infinite, which we have agreed is not the case. But the infinite number of small bodies of matter maintain the sum of things in the world, while harnessed teams not of oxen but blows assail them on every side. Take for instance the various species of beasts, some rare and apparently less fertile, still in distant places they may flourish and teem, thus filling out their numbers. We in Rome see elephants only rarely, but far

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off to the east, they thrive with their snaky trunks and their tusks so numerous that princes use them for palisades. 470 But let us suppose for the sake of argument some unique thing, some nonpareil like nothing else in the world that somehow came into being. It still would remain true that unless the sum of matter be infinite, it could not be conceived or made to grow and then be nourished. Imagine that the primal bodies that made up this one-of-a-kind thing were of finite number and that they were tossed about at random through the space of the universe. How would they meet to combine in the vast ocean of matter with all of its alien objects? What are the chances? How would they manage this long-odds feat? 480 The opposite is easy to visualize—how the ocean teems with pieces of wrecks of many ships, the transoms, masts, the ribs, the strakes and spars, and the oars floating along on the current to drift to shore and warn all men of the dangers of the violent sea and how we are never to trust the moments of calm and her lying smiles. Likewise, the atoms scatter though the tides of time and space, but they do not come together spontaneously to combine and grow into a ship.

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For that, there has to be order and planning, as there is in each kind of thing where from an infinite number of atoms 490 an object is made, and this is the triumph of things over random, deathly motions, for things renew themselves, and increase to preserve their various kinds, in the constant battle with dying, as the vital elements struggle to master and persevere. So in the funeral dirge that plays throughout the world we can also hear the cry of new-born infants appearing at the borders of light and life, as night yields itself to day, with the feeble cries the music’s counterpoint to the rales. Now the next subject is vital and you would be well advised to lock it away in your memory’s vaults as a precious treasure: 500 none of the things that appear before our eyes is made of only one kind of element, but rather of different seeds that have been commingled. And things have many and various powers, and the more they have, the greater the combination of different elements of varying characteristics and shapes. The earth contains the first beginnings from which the springs pour forth their waters busily replenishing the thirsty seas. She also contains the source of fire—we see in certain places the crust of the earth bubble up with flames 510

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as in the eruptions at Aetna. She also holds the sources of nourishment for crops and fruit trees on which mankind depends. She gives us leaves and pasturelands for the beasts. And therefore is she called the Great Mother of gods and mother, too, of beasts, and the maker of living bodies. To her the ancient poets of Greece have sung their praises, describing her in a chariot drawn by a pair of lions and teaching us that the world is poised in air—that the earth cannot stand upon earth. Their yoking the wild beasts is their way of describing how the gentle actions of parents may soften the fiercest nature. The crown they say she wears 520 is crenellated like walls of the fortified cities of which she is the awesome patroness. Thus portrayed, she is carried all over the wide earth in state, as men revere her in the different nations with various rituals—the goddess Cybele, from Ida, with her Phrygian band in train. To her we owe the gift of wheat and therefore of bread. Among her priests are the eunuchs who demonstrate to the world that those who offend her are not worthy of siring children into the light. Their hand-drums thunder and cymbals crash, and the horns strike fear into every heart with their strident blasts, 530 and above them the pipes’ piercing and shrill descant resounds. Before them they carry weapons, signs of their dangerous frenzies

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to inspire awe and wonder in the hearts of the multitude who see the goddess pass by, receive her silent blessings, and strew her path with copper and even silver coins that fall with a softer shower than rose petals upon the Mother and her troupe. Comes next the armed band whom the Greeks call Curetes, leaping in rhythmic dervish movements, scourging themselves bloody and shaking their helmet crests whenever they move their heads, recalling the Curetes 540 of Dicta in Crete who concealed Jupiter, Rhea’s child, dancing about him and making their loud noises to hide the wailing child so that Saturn, his father, might not find him, eat him alive, and thus fill Rhea’s great heart with grief. In memory of this, they still escort the goddess, in fighting armor to show that they are standing ready to defend their native land and their own pride and honor. That, at any rate, is the story the poets tell us, but what sense does it make when you think about it clearly? The divine gods are immortal, are they not? How then could they be 550 in any danger? Or concerned with our human lives down here? What can we possibly do to make them angry? Or please them? Do you think that the earth feels emotions? Or even sensations? It does indeed receive into itself the atoms

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of many things which it then brings forth into the light. But because you call the sea Neptune, or a field of wheat Ceres, or a bottle or barrel of wine Bacchus, does that imply that someone is there? These are mere names. So let the poets call the earth whatever they like, the Mother of Gods, even, so long as they don’t believe it 560 or expect their hearers and readers to take what they say to heart. Turn your attention now to a meadow in which there are grazing beasts of various kinds, wooly sheep and brave war horses and, not at all far from them, horned cattle, all of them munching the same grass and drinking the same water from the flowing brook, under the same azure sky. Each of them lives its life in its own shape and nature, following the pattern of its parents. So various is the life the same nourishment fosters in the same field and in the brook and pond as well. 570 So too are the parts diverse of which each creature is made— bones, blood, sinews, organs, guts, the different results that have come about from the same first beginnings. Think for that matter of fire, and the various things that burn, so different in form and yet hiding within them the same potential to throw off showers of sparks and give out light while scattering glowing embers that heretofore were concealed.

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Now extrapolate from that to all kinds of objects with seeds within them of many possible modes of being. And consider, too, those things which have color, taste, or smell, 580 gifts that they offer up in the manner of sacrifices on the altars of the gods in the fragrant smoke. These, too, must be made of atoms of various shapes and powers. Smell invades our bodies in a way that color cannot. And color and taste have different methods of sneaking into our senses. We must therefore infer that their component atoms have different shapes, and that unlike atoms agglomerate. Let me again suggest the model of these very verses in which there are many elements common to many words, although clearly the words and the verses are quite different, 590 and composed of different elements. Some letters occur more often than others, but no two words contain the same letters. And so it is with things in the world, that the seeds may be common to many things but occurring in different order to make up an altogether different entity—men or fields of growing grain, or verdant trees in the woods. There are limits, however, and ways in which atoms cannot combine, for without these constraints there could be all kinds of freaks and monsters, and poets’ dreams would wander the earth so that we could encounter

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centaurs, for instance, or creatures like Daphne with limbs that sprouted 600 leafy branches, or beings that combined the features of land and sea, like Scylla with her twelve heads, or Chimaeras, each with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a snake and breathing flames from all of its three mouths. But you’ve never seen such creatures grazing the fields or roaming the woodlands. They do not exist because things come from their parents, their seed producing beings like themselves, developing in the same way that their race has always done, again and again. There must be rules, a fixed and unvarying template, a predictable pattern in nature of growth and form. There are alien elements, too, that the body 610 ejects back into the world invisibly, exhaling, or perspiring, that could not play any part in the life process. But do not suppose that these laws only apply to living things, for the same limitations hold good elsewhere and as all created things are different from one another so it follows that each particular thing must be made of its own first beginnings. A few of these things are much alike; some in their makeup are altogether different with different spaces between the atoms and different weights

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and motions. As animals keep apart from one another, 620 so do the earth and the sea keep to themselves, and the sky keeps itself to itself over the solid earth. Now, if you will, pay special attention to this passage, these verses I have managed, with pleasure and pains combined, to produce for you about the tricky question of color. You perhaps suppose that the white things you are seeing are made of atoms that also are white, or things that are black must be composed of black atoms. And you extend that assumption to all shades and colors, supposing that matter takes its tint from the first seeds from which it is made— 630 unless of course they are painted or dyed with another hue. But atoms have no color, neither like nor different from the objects they make up. It is not so abstruse a question, but that the mind cannot puzzle it through. Think of men born blind who have never seen the light of the sun and yet know things in the world by their sense of touch. The idea of color does not even occur to them, and we should think in the same way of atoms not having a tint but colorless as they are when we touch objects in darkness. How is it then that atoms are colorless in this way? 640 It must be so, for colors change, and things that change color

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must first have undergone some other transformation— which atoms cannot do, being always the same, because they are the objects that always survive and persist in order that things in the world not be reduced to nothing. As we have already acknowledged, when a thing passes away, departing from its boundaries, that is the death of what it was before. For that reason, do not suppose that atoms can have any color and therefore be subject themselves to death. It also stands to reason that if atoms have no color, 650 and if they are endowed with a variety of shapes from which they can produce a range of various colors because of how they may be disposed and combined with others and what the motions may be that they give and receive, then color is not at all hard to account for, and things that were black before could become of a sudden a shining white. You have seen the ocean when the winds whip the waves into a white sea spume, and then, when the wind subsides, the water is almost black. This is what happens when atoms are moved and rearranged, or some are added or taken away. But if ocean’s atoms 660 were blue, as the surface often appears, it could never become foamy white, no matter what the winds and surging tides

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were doing to it. The atoms are neither black nor white. But say that different seeds make up the ocean’s color, just as, from different shapes, you can construct any number of different figures, fitting them into a square. Does this mean that all the components are square? Triangles work as well! And so it is on the sea’s surface or other expanse of uniform brightness—we are able to see sometimes one shade and later another, new and different. Nothing 670 prevents unlike figures from joining together to make a square on their outer edge, but different colors prevent a thing to be forever a single hue on its surface. The notion that things arise from seeds of the same color is also demonstrably false because we see in the world seeds that fall to the ground from which are born plants and flowers of colors altogether different. White seeds do not produce white plants, and black do not result in black. Better, then, to think of atoms as having no color whatsoever. Besides, in order to show some color 680 there has to be light, and many atoms never emerge into the light, wherefore we can assume that they have no more color than anything has in utter darkness. And another problem comes to mind—that light itself can change an object’s color, bright in direct sunshine but dull in the shadows: you’ve seen a dove in the glare of noon, with its iridescent neck a range of gem-like colors, now ruby red, now emerald green, or cobalt blue;

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or a peacock’s tail that will do the same with the tricks of light, changing shades as the bird parades this way and that. 690 You cannot therefore believe that colors are independent of light but must conclude that they cannot occur without it. The pupil of the eye receives one kind of blow when it perceives something white, and one quite different when it perceives black and all the rest of the hues and shades, and when you touch a thing its color does not matter but only the shape and texture register. Therefore, you may for these good reasons, too, suppose that the atoms have no need of color but, with their various shapes, give out perceptibly different kinds of messages to our fingers. 700 Another observation is that if no fixed shape displays any particular color but comes in many shades, and if many configuration of atoms come in things in a range of colors, in logic it ought to follow that we would see in each species all kinds of colorations. Crows that fly overhead would display their snow white plumage, and swans would be pitch black or pastel blue or mottled. It is also apropos to consider how when you pull an object into smaller and smaller pieces, the color changes or fades away entirely. Take purple 710 wool that you tear apart into individual fibers; the scarlet goes first, the brightest, but then the purple goes too as you shred it down to its component single threads.

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It seems that the particles somehow breathe their colors away and they are then dispersed into the seeds of things. And finally, since you must allow that not all bodies emit either sound or smell, it follows that you do not attribute those potentials to all the bodies there are. In the same way, we cannot perceive all things with our eyes, but you may be sure that they nevertheless exist, deprived 720 of color as some objects are lacking smells or sounds. The intelligent mind can nevertheless deduce that things are there, devoid though they may happen to be of some or even of all perceptible, sensible qualities. But you should not think that the atoms are only without color, for they also lack heat or cold, and they move along without sound, without any wetness, without any smell at all. Consider how you prepare a pleasant perfume that you compound of marjoram, spikenard, and fragrant myrrh to delight the nostrils: the first thing you want is pure olive oil, 730 as altogether lacking in scent as you can find so that it will not corrupt the delicate herbal bouquet of attars you plan to mix in and boil to make your balm. For a like reason, the atoms must not contribute their own odor, say, or sound, since they can emit nothing without some diminution. No taste, no heat or cold, nor any other perishable quality of things that may be soft or hard, rigid or pliant, fragile, as atoms are not, and cannot possibly be, but instead

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they are the foundation, imperishable, enduring, 740 on which the sum of existence rests and depends. Otherwise you would find that things in the world pass away to nothing. The next important subject is how things in the world that possess feelings are made nonetheless of unfeeling atoms. It takes only a little thinking to understand that there is no contradiction but rather a lovely logic as we come to realize how living creatures are born from atoms that are, themselves, insensible and inert. You have seen how wriggling worms arise from stinking dung. More to the point, perhaps, you have seen how rivers and pastures 750 change into beasts that graze and drink from them, and their substance changes again as we eat them to become parts of our bodies. It also happens that from our bodies beasts and birds increase their strength as they feast in turn upon our flesh. What nature seems to do is to change food into flesh of living bodies from which feelings arise. It is like the way she can take dry twigs and from them elicit fire. But the real lesson is how the position and order of atoms and how they are commingled is always of utmost importance. As your mind is taking this in, you wonder how mere matter 760

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can think, how your brain’s meat can understand and feel. Or in other words, you ask how can the sensible come from what is itself insensible? Stones and sticks and earth, however they’re put together, cannot think and talk! It does not always happen that way, and indeed is rare, but it does happen. Consider how small those elements are from which all things are made. The shape they take is vital for them to make a sensible thing, and their disposition and organization. But, yes, it surely happens. Think of those very same sticks and clods, out in the rain, rotting, 770 and from them crawl little grubs and worms as is their habit, the basic bodies of matter having been rearranged so that living things are produced to emerge into the world. There are those who suppose that thinking beings come from thinking elements that, in turn, must have been produced from thinking atoms—that have to be soft, because all sensation is the province of soft flesh and sinews and blood and bone. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that these thinking parts can last forever, as other atoms must do. What are we talking about? Do these parts have feelings and thoughts 780

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as parts, or are they rather like whole animals, small but complete unto themselves? Does that sound right? Our feelings are not those of the several parts of our bodies, but come from the integrated beings we are, with each part and organ related to something else. A hand, by itself, cut off from the rest of the body, feels nothing. But we are supposing these entities have sensation in the way that we do ourselves. How then can we call them the first beginnings of things that avoid the fate of death, if they are living and therefore mortal? And furthermore, supposing they were alive in conjunction and combination, what would their offspring be but more of themselves—as men or cattle or beasts in the forests produce only their own kind by coming together? And then again, if somehow they relinquish their sense of themselves and take on that of another being, how can one say that they are still the same as whatever passed away? Earlier when we discussed how a bird’s egg hatches a living chick, and worms and grubs come creeping out of the earth when putrefaction has had a chance to work after a rainstorm,

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we agreed that sensation can often arise from non-sensation. There are, to be sure, those who maintain that sensation can arise from non-sensation, but only by means of some process like birth by which it happens, but there is a simple answer that will make clear that birth itself cannot take place unless and until there has been some prior combination, and that nothing like sensation can otherwise occur. There cannot be any sensation before the living being has been formed, because its matter was held dispersed in the air, the earth, the rivers, and nothing had come together and joined so that the five senses could arise from the motions of atoms and the living being would then be equipped to protect itself. Suppose some organism endures a terrible blow, greater than what its nature is equipped to endure: thus stricken, its sensations of body and mind will be confused. It falls, for the way in which its atoms are arranged has been disturbed and its vital motions have been disorganized and upset. This shock, diffused throughout its frame, undoes all the circuits

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of the soul, which is ejected, perhaps through the pores of the skin. What else would such a blow do but break apart the connections of that being? With a slightly less violent blow 820 the vital motions may prevail and can then resume as the shock of the blow wears off. The processes of life elude the dark death that impended and menaced the creature as they recommence their flow through their proper routes and channels, rekindling those sensations that had been nearly lost. How else do you suppose a body can ever recover, recoiling from death’s doorway to return to life and light rather than pass away through the exit that gapes for us all? Consider, too, the question of pain, when the body’s matter is assaulted by some force through the flesh and the limbs tremble 830 in their hidden places inside us, and then, perhaps, they recover and we are again hale and relieved. But it cannot be that our atoms feel any pain or, later, when we recover, pleasure, because they are not composed of various parts that can be disarranged. They cannot be troubled or pleased, but they do whatever they do, without any need of sensation. The whole idea is absurd of atoms that can feel,

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which some assume as the precondition for having feelings. Can you imagine the atoms laughing together at jokes? Do they have high-minded conversations on learned questions? Do they, perhaps, wonder where they themselves came from? And since, in this view, they resemble the whole mortal, do they consist of smaller elements that also chat and discuss? It keeps on going backwards, and smaller and smaller. I say, if you tell me whatever has sense, must be made up of smaller parts that also laugh and cry and are wise, I answer that this is madness, not a theory but rather a nightmare. Surely we can laugh without being made of laughing elements, or reason without being made of smart and clever seeds. And if that is the case, then it must follow that what we see in the world that is capable of feeling is made up of smaller parts that do not have feelings at all. But this is how it is: we are all the children of heaven and earth, the same father who pours down drops of rain to our mother, the earth whose teeming brings forth the life of crops, of trees, of farmyard beasts and birds, and of wild as well, and of man, and she feeds us all so that we may survive and breed

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our kind, which is why in reverence we call her our dear mother. Whatever comes from earth returns in time to earth, and what falls from the sky’s ether evaporates back to the sky 860 where heaven welcomes it home. So death does not destroy matter but only disperses abroad the atoms of which things were made, which it then may well conjoin anew in some different arrangement. This is how things can change their colors and shapes, receive the gift of sensation and then in time offer it back. It is for these cogent reasons that you must understand the importance of how the atoms arrange themselves in their endless dance of life and death, the motions they give and receive, and that you realize how atoms are not what we see in the world’s surface, coming to be and passing away in an instant. 870 These atoms are the alphabet of the universe and their order determines the verses they make: the sky, the sea, the rivers, the sun, the crops, the trees, and the living beasts. They are not at all the same, but they share in common many fundamentals, the differences being in how they combine. My verses and the world’s are alike in this—the order, position, and disposition change and the world is changed.

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Now I come to a subject that requires an open mind for what I am about to discuss is a new idea, a different view of creation, and this requires a fresh 880 and receptive spirit. Think how men look up at the blue, dizzying heights of the sky at which they once, as children, gazed in awe and wonder. Or look at night at the whirling planets and constellations, their intricacy and order that struck you once with such force, and the moon’s motion, and sun’s. Think what it would be if you went outside at night for the first time in your life and looked up to behold these astonishing things. Could you begin to find words to describe the exaltation you’d feel? It’s all still there, but we take whatever is familiar for granted and we grow dull, 890 satiated with miracles we have seen so often before. How many of us now still bother to look up to the dazzling vault of the heavens? Never mind new ideas and ingenious logic, but think of what you have known and seen and if you recognize its truths, then admit and yield, but if you think what I’m saying here is false, prepare yourself to do battle. Now, turn your attention to space, infinite above us, beyond the world’s confines. The mind must wonder what is up there and seek to discover what those impossible distances hold. Do we merely imagine 900 as the mind flies free, or is there something really out there?

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All around us, in every direction and up and down, the universe, as we have already agreed, extends without any possible limit. And these inconceivable heights and depths give forth the light that we see. If space continues infinitely, and atoms in their infinite number are flying in all directions driven by their own everlasting motion, then it is hard to suppose that the round earth we stand on under the round sky is the only world that exists. What would all that other matter be doing in all 910 that endless space? The question is clarified by our theory that the world arose and was made at random by natural means. Of their own accord the seeds of things bumped into each other, aimlessly crashing together until, at last, somehow, some of them combined with others, to mark the beginning of mightier things—the sky, the earth, the living beasts. How can we assert that if this could happen here it has not also happened elsewhere in the huge embrace of the endless ether in which we too are floating? Conceive, if you can, of abundant matter in limitless space 920 with nothing at all there to prevent the meeting of atoms. How could it not have happened? Think of the present abundance of atoms: they have always been here and everywhere else, with the same remarkable powers, the same motions, the same energy—how can there not be other worlds than our own that have come together in the same way as ours has done? And not only other worlds, but different breeds of beasts,

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different plants, and different races of men and women! There is not, in the sum of things, any unique being, that grows up to its own pattern and is not a part 930 of a family or a group. Look at the animal kingdom for a demonstration of this most plausible argument, the fish in the lakes and seas, the birds in the sky, and men are all examples of this. Would the rule not also extend to suns and moons and planets, however far away? These are not unique but rather are numberless, and like us each of these beings has an allotted limit to its existence as all things also have on earth. There is a wonderful implication to this world view, for if you accept these ideas, you will see that nature is freed 940 at once from any domination by proud gods and she is her own master, doing what she does without any interference. The gods? I appeal to their hearts as they pass their untroubled days in an uninterrupted peace. But who has the strength to rule over what cannot be measured? Who can hold in his hand the infinite? What mind can turn the stars of the heavens and warm the worlds with fire? Who can be present always and everywhere, shaking the sky with thunder or covering over the light with ominous clouds? (Sometimes it happens that lightning will hit the gods’ own temples, 950 or the deities in a huff will strike at the guilty and miss and instead cut down in error those who’ve done nothing wrong.)

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Since the world first came into being, and earth and sea were parted, and the sun first rose in the sky, there have been countless bodies that have been added, myriad seeds that have come to us from the great totality of what is. From these has the land grown, the oceans have also increased, and the dwelling-place of the sky has lifted up its towers high over the earth, and the winds have blown across it. For the atoms are distributed everywhere by collisions from everywhere, each to its own opportune target, and then, after a time, they pass back out, returning to the space from which they came, liquid to liquid, earth to earth, fire to fire, and air to air until their cycle has been completed, and nature, the maker of things, is done with them. We see this happening in the aged when less of the stuff of life is flowing into the vessels than is flowing out and passing away. One reaches a point when growth stops and a diminution begins. The merry aggrandizement of youth’s vitality does not last and we do not grow forever absorbing into the veins nature’s food, but we begin to wane and spend more than we take in. Age erodes our vigor and melts in a desuetude that ends in dissolution. When growth has ceased, the larger and stronger a being was, the more atoms it scatters, dispersing on all sides what it can no longer maintain. The constant blows from without it can no longer resist but now it begins

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to break up and break down until it is subdued. In just such a manner the walls of the great world itself 980 shall also be stormed and finally shattered in a process that is constant and universal, when the food it needs for repairs no longer serves as it once did. Its arteries do not supply it with nourishment, and the powers of life wane. The earth can no longer produce those tiny creatures she once teemed with or give birth to the bodies of huge beasts. I do not believe that the races of mortal creatures were made in heaven somewhere and sent down to the earth by a golden chain, nor did wild life spring forth from the sea where the waves break on the rocks, but the earth produced them, then as now, of her own accord— 990 the grain, the vineyards, the fruits, the pasturage for cattle. But she does not now have the vigor she once displayed: the oxen must exhaust themselves and wear out the blades of plows to coax from grudging fields what once grew plentifully on its own, and the farmer shakes his head and sighs and tells the stories of how it was in his father’s time, and what a decline he has seen with his own eyes in the fields he knows so well. And his neighbor with the vineyard talks of his shriveled vines that produce now fewer grapes than they did when he was a boy

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when the world was young and healthy and a small holding could give a great portion. Those good old days are surely gone, and decay is everywhere, and we slip toward the lip of the grave.

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In the murk of our darkness, you, Epicurus, raised your blazing lantern to show us the blessings of life. And I follow you, walking with confident footsteps the trails that you have blazed, not to be your rival, but in admiration and love, and happy to have your example to guide me. How could I think of competing with you? A swallow might as well vie with swans, or a young kid on its wobbly legs presume to race alongside a strong horse. You are our father, our leader, our pioneer, discovering truths that you share with us.

A passage of Book III of this poem has appeared in Per Contra, to which the translator expresses his thanks.

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You are like one of those bees that goes out to find the flowers and then brings back word to the hive of where the sweet nectar is for them all. So do we feed on your words of perdurable gold that are worthy of everlasting life. We begin to follow your thoughts, your arguments, and your reasons, and our mind’s terrors abate, while the opaque walls of the world open wide to exhibit the intricate actions and movements that go on all the time throughout the limitless void. Through you, I see the gods in their tranquil dwelling places, where no harsh winds ever blow, where no dark clouds approach with the threat of violent storms, and it never snows or freezes, but a gentle air surrounds them attendant on their pleasures and nature never obtrudes on their lofty peace of mind but amplifies their delight. To them, Acheron’s gloomy regions are an unlikely story. They look down on the earth beneath and watch with the same keen understanding as you, Epicurus, have taught to us, the intricate business of nature’s inner workings that I contemplate with awe and an all but divine delight in what you expound and explain. I have already described the atoms, the seeds of things, their different shapes and motions as they fly about on their own,

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and how all things in the world are derived from their combinations. The next subject to which we turn our attention is the mind, the animus, and the spirit, the anima, and the way to get rid of the fear of death that troubles us all, tainting all our delights and shadowing every moment with Acheron’s gloom. More than they fear the pains of disease or guilt and shame, men dread the bottomless chasm of death. Some there are who claim that the soul, which is in the blood, or perhaps in the air we breathe, survives and never dies, and they have no use for logic and reason. But I shall explain their ideas are fantastic and their hopes not based upon fact. Take some poor fellow, banished for his disgraceful crime, living beyond the edge of nowhere, but still alive. What does he do but continue his sacrifices of cattle and prayers to his forebears’ ghosts, and, in his misery, hope for a less wretched life than this in another and better world? It is always in such adversity that we learn what a man is made of, what truth or what superstition informs his thoughts and actions, and what resources he brings with which to confront his troubles. The mask is torn away, and you look at his real face.

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Bizarrely enough it is that fear of death that ruins the life of a man as he strives for wealth and power, scheming and plotting day and night to climb the greasy pole by fair means or foul. Even though he’s afraid of men’s scorn, his real worry is that he may wake up one day in poverty somehow, and from this he strives to escape. The sweetness of life and its simple pleasures he overlooks, as he vies with other men, amassing wealth, ruthless even to doing murder or fomenting civil war. Imagine that a brother dies, one whom he never loved, and he rejoices in the hope of what he’ll inherit. For like reason he never ventures to dine with a kinsman whose intentions may be poisoned and the wine goblet as well. In the same way he may be consumed with bitter envy of someone with pomp and power who parades through the town, while he wallows in obscurity’s murk. Men wear themselves out for the sake of a statue somewhere with their name proclaimed on the plinth. The fear of death corrupts the love of life and the light, and men can waste their time brooding that they are mortal so that they take no comfort in each pleasant passing moment. For their fear of death some men dishonor themselves, betray their friends, even their dear parents and fatherland,

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all in the hope of postponing that journey to Acheron’s bleak kingdom. In darkness, children imagine terrible monsters, but we, in the light of day, are as terrified as they are, imagining many ghastly forms of our decease, one of which we suppose will have to come true someday. And how do we dispel this constant dread in the mind’s dark recesses? The rays of the sun are not sufficient, but reason is and the contemplation of nature’s laws. 80 The mind—or shall we call it intelligence—whatever understands and governs the lives of men is a part of the human body no less than hands or feet or eyes. There are some who have said that intelligence is not thus to be found in any particular part but rather is some kind of harmony of the body, an aura, through which we think and feel. They compare the idea of good physical health, which is everywhere to be found but in no particular place, and they say that the mind is like that, the result of a proper adjustment. I think they are dead wrong. You know you can stub your toe 90 while the rest of you is fine. And it also can sometimes happen that the mind is sick but the body is otherwise robust, just as that stubbed toe does not cause pain in the head. Besides, think of what happens at night when we go to sleep and the body relaxes and neither hears nor sees, but the mind

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on its own continues its work with the joys and fears of dreams. The spirit, too, I say is within the corporeal frame and not some nebulous aura or evidence of a proper harmony of the parts. Think what happens to men who lose a leg but somehow continue to live. Are they not 100 possessed any more of souls? Or put the question the other way and ask, at the moment of death, when the heat of life disperses into the air and the last breath is expelled, whether the soul remains. Has it not also departed, leaving the flesh and bones? From this we may deduce that not all atoms have the same purpose and function or support life in the same way, but there are seeds of air and of warmth that keep life within our bodies, and those are what desert our frames at the moment of death. Harmony is all well and good, but give the idea 110 back to the Muses who dwell on Helicon’s heights or else to musicians here on earth who delight us and from whom some have taken the notion and applied it, just on a guess, to what they do not begin to understand of the body and could not explain by any other, more rational means. My position is this—that the mind and spirit are held together and that they have a single nature in common, but the head or, if you will, the lord of the body is mind, the intelligence, which is found in its dwelling-place in the chest. This is where we feel terror and also transports of joy. 120

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The rest of the spirit, dispersed throughout the entire body, obeys the intelligence, which alone is the locus of sense, for it can rejoice when nothing affects either spirit or body. Just as when your head or your eye is hurt by some wound, you do not experience pain in the other parts of the body, so the mind can be hurt, or be exalted with joy, and the other parts of the body are not affected at all. But when it happens that mind is shaken by overwhelming terror, then the spirit throughout the rest of the body shakes, sharing that feeling, and sweat pours down the face, 130 speech falters, the throat goes dry, and the eyes fail as the world seems to go dark. The ears give way, and the limbs, so that men stagger and fall from the terror the mind has felt. Considering this, we must suppose how the mind and spirit are joined together, for when the mind’s powers are hurt the effects are felt right away in the rest of the body’s parts. The same logic will demonstrate that both the mind and spirit are physical entities. The mind dictates to the limbs where to go and it rouses the body from slumber. It changes the face’s expression, the posture, as if from the captain’s bridge, 140 but it cannot do any of this without the sense of touch, and inasmuch that there can be no touch without body, it follows that the mind and spirit must have the same nature as the body. You know that the mind will suffer

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and share the body’s pain. If a weapon strikes our flesh and disarticulates a joint but fails to kill the entire organism, the mind will go into shock and feel an almost blissful languor as we fall to the ground where there may then be some mental turmoil, a wish perhaps to rise. We can see from this how the mind must be physical since it suffers from a physical weapon and blow. Let us now consider what kind of organ the mind must be and how and of what it is formed. First of all, I suggest that it is delicate, fragile, and made of tiny particles. We can deduce that this must be so from the speed of the mind’s workings and how it not only reacts but initiates, too, as thoughts rise up and it bestirs itself on its own. Whatever is quick as the mind must consist of minute seeds, perfectly rounded and perfectly mobile so that they may react when touched by the slightest motion. We see how water moves in response to the tiniest movement and from this we conclude that its atoms must be small and round to be so easily rolling. But honey is different, its fluid more cohesive and its movement very much slower. Honey, we therefore infer, is made of bodies less smooth, less delicate, less rounded. Think of a pile made up of poppy seeds. The slightest puff of breath will start

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those at the top to roll down. Now think of a pile of stones, or a pile of seed corn, and that same breath with go for nothing, the pile being more stable with its parts so heavy and rough. 170 Now, going back to the mind that moves with such impressive speed, we must assume that it consists of atoms of exceedingly small size and round, and very smooth. The fact itself is important, but the method, too, is instructive, for you will see it apply to solve other questions as well. There is an altogether different line of reason that suggests why the mind and spirit are of such a delicate texture and how small must be the space they occupy in the body, for when death occurs, and its peace has taken a man, you cannot perceive how slight is the diminution in weight and size. 180 The only thing that changes is that the heat of the body cools, and therefore the spirit must be made up of tiny seeds that are interconnected through the vessels, flesh, and sinews. The spirit leaves and it almost seems that nothing has happened, the corpse looking the same as the body had looked before, but think of the change in wine as the bouquet disappears, or fragrant ointments that give up all their blended aromas but seem in no obvious way diminished in their substance. Food, too, can lose its flavor but look and feel just the same.

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Those tiny atoms that carry the savor or smell of a thing 190 must be like those of which the mind and spirit are made, since, as they depart, their absence is hard to measure. But we must not suppose that the nature of these organs is made of only one kind of atom, but rather they seem to be mixtures, amalgamations of the thin breath and the heat that leave the dying. So heat and air and breath are mixed together, which demonstrates how rarefied these atoms must be. In addition to these three parts of the vital compound, which are needful but not sufficient, there must yet be something else to produce feeling, since mind cannot rely on any 200 of these to produce the impulses, thoughts, and feelings it spawns. There is also something else, mysterious and nameless, and nothing in the world is diaphanous as this or made of smoother atoms, or smaller ones. This substance is what sends out all the signals to the limbs and the rest of the body. To this is added the air and breath with the power of wind, and the vital heat. These four agitate the blood and fill the flesh with feeling, communicating to bone and even marrow the pleasure or pain that the moment occasions. The body, of course, is well defended, and it takes a violent 210 blow for pain to penetrate so deeply as to foment a riot among the parts and leave no room for life to continue to function and make the spirit’s particles flee

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through the small pores of the skin. Most of the time, the wound is not so severe and we are strong enough to withstand it. This isn’t easy, I fear. I want to be clear and concise, explaining as well as I can how the four parts of the spirit are intermingled and interdependent and how they’re arranged, but over and over I find that I am sorely constrained by our mother tongue and its poverty in the technical terms I need. Still, I will do my best to touch on the major issues. The first beginnings of these four elements mix and mingle in such a way as to interpenetrate one another so that none of them by itself can be separated out in space, nor can its singular power be isolated, but they function together, the many forces of one body. Think of the meat of a creature you dine on—a certain taste and smell and texture. In the living beast, they were all mixed inextricably. So heat, and air, and wind are mixed to form a single being into which that fourth unnamable force is infused, distributing itself among the other three, and from that union come motion and sensation that spread throughout the flesh. This fourth substance, which we might call the spirit’s spirit, is hidden away in the body’s secret recesses, deep but vital—tiny, scanty elements that carry

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the force of our mental powers and what we call our souls. They are what rule the body as the lords of a great domain, but it is in a like manner that heat and air and wind interact and commingle, yielding to one another 240 or else, on other occasions, rising to dominate, but always in some cooperative balance, for otherwise heat and wind and air would disperse, destroy one another, and bring to an end not only sensation but also life. We know there is heat in the mind from the burning feeling of anger that can boil up in wrath when flames flash in the eyes. We also know there is cold—fear’s intimate comrade that can make the limbs shiver and cause the entire frame to quake. We know, too, that the calm of quiet air is a part of the compound, from those moments of serene 250 repose that we have the good fortune sometimes to enjoy. Some creatures there are who are likely to give in to anger because their hearts are hotter and their simmering easily turns to a rolling boil. Think of how the great lion roars as if to burst his breast with an outpouring of passion he can barely contain within his robust frame. The stag is obviously different, cooler, as wind sends chilling currents through his flesh so that he often shivers. The cow, I’d suggest, is the tranquil beast in which the peaceful air is the dominant force. She neither rages nor trembles, 260 for in her the torch of fury is seldom lit and its smoke never blinds her, but neither is she often stricken by cold terror. She stands between the stag and the roaring lion.

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This is also the range of the ways of mankind. True, training may count for something, and we can be polished and changed but there always will be the traces of our original natures, our predispositions one way or another. Our innate faults cannot be altogether torn out by their roots, so that one man is less likely to take offense or exhibit anger, while another may be less subject to fears. 270 A third, more meek than they, will put up with more than he should. From what we know about men and women, we can be certain that there are these innate leanings and, although I cannot sort them out or correlate proclivities and atoms, there must be a physical basis for these differences in behavior. Still, my surmise is that these variations are quite minute, and whatever inclinations we may have been born with, we can, by the power of reason, compensate and adjust so that we all can have lives equal to those of the gods. The soul, then, is contained and diffused throughout the entire 280 body and it is the body’s guardian and wellspring, for soul and body cling together, are intertwined in such a way as to be inseparable without mutual destruction. Think of removing the scent from a lump of frankincense: you cannot do it without destroying its very nature. In just such a way you cannot think of removing mind and spirit from a body

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without a dissolution of everything. They live together; they co-exist; from their first beginnings they use each other, for neither body nor mind alone has the power 290 to feel or to move alone without the help of the other. It is through their partnership that the common impulse arises from both of them together that our flesh can feel and move. A body is born with a soul, and after its death they part. It is not that one is an accident or property of the other. It is not like heated water that gives off its heat and returns to the ambient temperature. The body and soul are united in a more fundamental way, and the body, after the soul has departed, is quite undone and it falls apart and rots. From its start in the mother’s womb, when the fetus quickens and moves, 300 body and spirit are working together, learning their vital motions, and if that spirit departs, there is then a stillbirth. From this we conclude that without the necessary conjunction of spirit with flesh, neither one can succeed alone. If anyone were to deny that the body itself can feel but only the spirit mingled throughout can feel and move, he contradicts what we all know and have taken for granted. You look at a corpse and you know that the spirit is gone, and the body no longer feels a thing, for what has been lost was not merely some property or possession or attribute—like color 310

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or heat—but a vital component, an essential part of itself. There are some who maintain that the eyes, by themselves, see nothing but are portals, merely, through which the mind somehow peers out. But this is a difficult argument to try to maintain. We know that in very bright glare the eyes, until they have made an adjustment, cannot see a thing. Would this happen with portals? An open door through which we look out at the world can never block our view. And one might go so far as to argue that plucking out the eyes would be merely removing the portals, the doors, the gates, the door jams, which only stand in the way. 320 That ought to allow in more rather than less or nothing. The great Democritus tells us something that may raise a problem for us when he claims that the atoms that make the body and those that make the soul are placed beside each other and linked together. But soul atoms are smaller than those of bodies and also fewer in number and widely scattered. Indeed, you may safely say that the spirit atoms are so far from one another that when truly tiny objects touch us they do not produce any sensation at all. Think of when there is dust that has settled upon your skin, 330 or chalk perhaps, or mist at night, or a spider web that you neither see nor feel. Or a feather. Or thistle-down.

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These things are extremely light and fall very slowly, so you may or may not feel them. Think of mosquitoes’ footsteps or gnats’ that go for a time unnoticed, but then they approach where one of those spirit atoms is lodged and, when it is struck, then you begin to feel it, as the atoms come together and leap apart in their unending, vital dance. Meanwhile, as between mind and spirit, the mind is stronger in holding the fortifications at the barriers of life 340 than the spirit can be, for without the mind there can be no spirit that persists for even an instant anywhere in our bodies but it follows along to depart into the air, leaving the cooling corpse behind in the rough embrace of death. But the man whose mind remains and is able to think is still, no matter how mutilated his body may be, alive and breathing the air. Deprived of much of his spirit he yet has enough of it remaining to linger and cling to life. To understand how this happens, think of an eye that is cut, but the pupil remains untouched, and the eye’s power of sight 350 survives, if the whole eyeball has not been utterly mangled or the cut does not encircle the pupil destroying both it and the eyeball too. But if that spot in the eye’s center is hurt, then what will happen is unremitting darkness,

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though the rest of the eye is unharmed. The light is like the life that can remain, if the mind and spirit have not been destroyed. Another but not unrelated subject we must address is that minds and spirits of living creatures are brought to birth and that they are mortal. I shall contrive to deal with this problem in verses I hope may be worthy of your refined attention. 360 For the purpose of our discussion, let these terms be used interchangeably—mind and spirit—for they are one, function together, and manifest a combined nature. These particles of spirit are, as I have suggested, most extremely small, smaller than atoms of flowing water for instance, or cloud, or smoke, for they surpass all these in their innate quickness and move if touched even by the most delicate stimulus—smoke for instance, or, less than that, a dream of mist or of smoke rising up from an altar (for these are doubtless the images they hold 370 and return to us). At any rate, when a vessel is shattered, the water it held flows out on every side and disperses. We have seen smoke and vapor disperse that way in the air, and we must believe that the soul, in a similar fashion, scatters from a man’s body even more swiftly into its atoms. The body that was its vessel can no longer hold it together when the blood is withdrawn from the veins. And the air, which is less dense

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than the body, cannot contain those atoms that make up the soul. It is our view that the mind is engendered along with the body and grows up and grows old along with the body. Children 380 are born weak and learn how to hold up their heads and crawl, and they grow into youth’s robustness—as minds and souls do, too, for the understanding grows and the mind’s powers are greater. And then, as old age comes on, the frame becomes infirm, and the mind, as well, commences to totter. The tongue wags, and that keen intellect wanes. We therefore conclude that spirit must dissolve as the body itself does, smoke in the wind, inasmuch as it is born and grows and then dies, worn out and falling apart as the body is, with the years. It hardly needs to be added that minds, like bodies, are subject 390 to dreadful diseases, and may be undone by grief and fear. From this, too, we are able to draw the proper conclusion— that like the body the mind is also subject to death. It is true, too, that the mind, when the body is sick, will wander into dementia, babble, or drowse off into a deep coma, with eyelids drooping and a head that lolls on the pillow

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entirely unresponsive to the voices of those he knows and loves who surround the bedside and whose tears run down their faces as they try to coax the patient back to awareness and life. Another phenomenon that may be relevant here 400 is how strong drink can affect a man with its fiery power that disperses through the veins to spread throughout the body. With too much wine a person’s arms and legs turn heavy, he staggers, his speech is slurred, he hiccups, his mind is affected, his eyes swim and fail to focus, and he becomes loud and unruly. In taverns brawls burst out all the time among men who are otherwise civil and well behaved. And why is this so? How else can we explain the effects of too much wine except by supposing the alcohol confuses the spirit wherever it is in the body? And if it can be confused 410 and affected in this way, then with further and stronger causes, the atoms of spirit would perish and it—and the body— would die. Another instructive and relevant demonstration of souls’ relationship to bodies is in what we sometimes observe in those who have epileptic fits. As if they were stricken by bolts of lightning, these people fall to the ground and foam at the mouth. They groan and their limbs shudder and shake. They rave,

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grow rigid, twist and turn, writhe, and their breathing is labored. They exhaust themselves with their violent, contorted movements. The body is like the sea that some sudden storm has lashed into fury 420 when the cold salt waves seem to come to a rolling boil. The groans that the pain of the limbs produces are forced from a clenched mouth in a great pile-up where, before, words and sounds could pass in an orderly way. With the mind and spirit in such turmoil, there is incoherent raving. The poison humor that causes the illness sooner or later returns to its hidden lair, the suffering abates, and the man returns to his senses, pulls himself together, staggers to his feet, and is, as we say, himself again. You see from this how the spirit can be afflicted while it is inside the body, 430 torn apart that way, in misery and great anguish. How can you then suppose that, outside the body, the spirit in open air would be able in any way to survive? It is also true that the mind is like the body in this, that it can be healed from sickness by the medicines of doctors, of which the curious implication is that also it can fail to be cured or, in other words, it can die. For what the doctors must be doing is either adding or taking away, or at least rearranging the mind’s atoms, and what can be added to or transformed or transposed 440

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is clearly not immortal. We have already discussed how, if something is changed, its old form passes away, which is the death of what it was before. If the mind changes, sickens, improves, by the doctors’ ministrations, it has to be mortal. The spirit flies out of the body as surely as the logic of the contrary argument flies off into the ether, having been proven a falsehood. It sometimes happens, and you may have seen this for yourself, that a man dies by degrees, with the toes and the toenails first going numb, and then the feet and the legs go livid, and death seems to climb toward the trunk as the rest of the body grows cold. In such happenings, atoms of spirit, which are dispersed throughout the entire body, do not all issue at once, but they too go by degrees, in which case it must be admitted that spirit is divisible and, from that it follows, mortal. The only other way to account for what we see happen is the idea that the spirit, of its own accord, draws inward, pulling its substance back into the still functioning parts of the body where it can survive a little longer. But is that an even plausible notion? The part where the spirit is concentrated now would have to be more and more sensitive. But there’s no such place, not the result the theory suggests. The spirit is torn into shreds, is dispersed

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abroad. But even supposing that something as unlikely as this could occur, it would make no difference at all, for it is of no consequence whether the spirit escapes into the air or withdraws into some compact space where it grows duller and dies at last. Either way, it dies, and in these piecemeal deaths, the less there is of the man and the less life that remains, the less there is of the spirit. 470 It is also incontrovertibly true that the mind has a fixed place in the body, and in that it is like the eyes and ears and all the other organs that sustain our lives. They cannot exist cut off from the body. An independent hand? A nose, all by itself? Or an eye? They do not move or smell or see, but dissolve and quietly rot. Likewise, the mind without the body, without the man himself which is its requisite vessel, faces a similar fate. Let us appeal to our common sense of the world’s workings and agree that the body and mind have vigor and liveliness only 480 in close conjunction. Without the body, the mind is unable to do what it does, controlling the physical motions we make, and without the spirit, the body is merely insensate meat. Because the atoms of spirit are held throughout the body commingled everywhere in the flesh, the veins, and the bones, and they cannot leap about in freedom or even connect, being so widely scattered, their very confinement produces the sense-giving motions on which we all rely—but they cannot survive outside the body and float free in the air

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after our death, that confinement being what they required. 490 The thin air is not a body or living creature, and in it the actions of these atoms of spirit are not plausible or possible. The sinews and bones they lived in were their proper dwelling places. So once more I put it to you that when the body breaks up and the breath of life is expelled, the sensations of mind and spirit, which are joined together, also depart, dissolve to their primal atoms, and are no more. Indeed, what we see in death, time after time, is the way the body, deprived of spirit, rots and emits a dreadful stench. This demonstrates that the spirit surely has fled 500 its habitat in the inner recesses of flesh and bone, oozing out and diffusing like smoke into thin air. The reason for the sudden and woeful collapse of the body is precisely that it has been shorn of its governing spirit. Its foundation is gone. The spirit, disintegrating into tiny bits has passed through all the internal vessels and pores of the skin to leave it behind and swim in the gelid air. It can also sometimes happen that the spirit, still in the body and still alive, can weaken, sicken, and wish to depart, to escape somehow from the confines of the body it dwells within. 510 At such times, the face droops and the arms and legs go limp. The blood, more and more turgid, slows in its flow, and we say

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that “the spirit is failing,” or maybe “the mind is giving way.” Those who surround the bedside can read the signs and fear what they know is about to happen. They try to pull him back, calling to him, but his mind is barely paying attention, and he scarcely seems to hear or to recognize the voices of those he loves. Any shock, at such a time, can tip the balance. Considering this, why would you think the spirit, weakened as it has been, could survive outside in the world 520 without any protection against the wind and weather, when it could not survive in the safety of its accustomed haunts? It is clear that nobody feels his soul depart as a whole being, some great gob that rises up through the gullet. Instead what people feel is an absence, perhaps, in the region that first was afflicted, and then, throughout the rest of the body, and maybe they even sense the start of its dissolution. If in any way mind and spirit could be thought of as immortal, then it would not disperse but pass out whole as a snake might do from its old skin. 530 Things have their proper places, and the spirit is like any other thing, having its right and natural setting. You don’t

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think and feel with your head or hands or feet, for the soul abides in only one proper and fixed position assigned to it at birth, as all your organs are, and there it can survive and function. Your limbs are arranged in a patterned and practical way. (You wouldn’t expect that fire might come from a running brook, or frost from a crackling blaze.) For all the myths about spirits wandering sadly in Hades, what would that mean in practical terms? Are spirits endowed 540 with five senses, as poets and painters would have us believe? Do spirits have eyes? Or noses? Tongues? Ears? Or hands? How else would they know where they are? Or whether they even exist? We take the view, and I think this is correct, that the spirit inheres in the whole body. And supposing that this is true, then what happens in battle, when a soldier is cut in half so that the upper and lower sections are severed? The spirit would also, as they say, be cloven in twain, would it not? But what can be cut in half and divided that way into parts cannot possibly claim to be deathless and everlasting. 550 We have heard those grisly stories of barbarian chariots armed with whirling blades on the spokes that can cut off an arm or a leg

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in an instant, and it falls to the ground and quivers there, while the man, in shock from the sudden wound hardly feels pain, his mind entirely filled with the mad ardor of battle. There are accounts of those thus maimed who kept on fighting as if they had not noticed that an arm had been lopped off, even perhaps with the shield still attached by its strap and carried away by the horses of that terrible battle car. Another tries to rise from the ground, falls down again, and only then realizes that he’s missing his left leg, which, a few feet away, is still twitching its toes. They even say that a head that has been cut off continues to glare with its open eyes and to blink several times, until the blood drains out of the vessels of what had been the neck and the spirit escapes from what is now a macabre trophy. Slightly less exotic perhaps are the stories of snakes that farmers have hacked in half, and the parts separately writhe and spatter the earth with gore, while the head turns back to gnaw the burning pain of the wound, and the tail continues to wriggle. Does each of these two pieces now contain a spirit? Would it not then follow that in every creature many spirits must dwell? But what sense can that possibly make? Logic would require that each indivisible spirit,

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which was one within the living body, now be divided into component parts—which means that it can’t be immortal. It is also a troublesome problem, if you argue that the immortal spirit somehow creeps into the body at birth, to explain why it doesn’t seem to remember an earlier time, perhaps in other lives. Is the power of mind so reduced as to be wholly unable to recall a single thing it has done or seen or felt? Is that not tantamount to death? And if the spirit, reborn, is that blank slate, then what does it mean to suggest that it is in some way immortal? And then, at the moment of birth, what is the spirit’s condition? Is it, too, new-born, or is it already mature, a kind of an adult caged in a baby’s diminutive body? But we know from our observation of infants and young children that the spirit grows within the developing frame of the body, permeating each part and strengthening day by day. For that reason alone, we can say that, without any question, the spirit cannot be considered as without a beginning or end, immune from the laws of life and death, for we know the connection of mind and spirit is strong and close—as it could not be

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if a strange presence had been introduced somehow from without. What we know to be true from watching our own children grow is exactly the opposite of this weird notion. The flesh, the sinews, the nerves, the bones, and even the teeth are connected to spirit, as we can tell when cold water causes a twinge or a seed gets caught between them. How can the spirit then 600 loosen itself from all of the body’s organs and parts? But even so, let us suppose that the spirit infuses the body, creeping in and oozing throughout the frame. The way it is now intermingled will keep it from any escape, for that which permeates is bound up in the fate of what it is now part of. The spirit is everywhere in all the pores and apertures of the body—rather like food which is dispersed and digested, supplying the body’s limbs with its substance. It is much like that with spirit and mind, which (by this theory) enter a body and dissolve in it, its atoms 610 dispersed through all the vessels and intricate interstices into the organs and limbs. That spirit that now lords over the body and rules it, thinks and feels for it, must have perished when it was so distributed. How can it then be immortal, without a happy birthday and without a sad day of death? We take up the question now of whether the atoms of spirit

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survive in a dead body. There are two possible answers, but oddly enough the conclusion we draw from both is the same. Suppose that the soul’s atoms remain in the corpse. If they do, they cannot be thought of as deathless, since they have been diminished 620 by the loss of the body they lived in. But then, on the other hand, assume that the spirit atoms have fled at the moment of death with all of their parts intact, and leaving behind nothing of what it was. Then how does the corpse generate worms in its rotten remains? Whence come all of those boneless and bloodless nasty creatures that swarm through the corpse, each of which claims presumably some primitive version of soul? There was one, and now there are hundreds and thousands! Do you imagine the spirit’s atoms go hunting for whatever vehicle they can escape to, even those of the maggots? How can we answer this question? 630 Why should they condescend to find such new bodies, for when they were bodiless, they could not be troubled by hunger, cold, or disease? These are the trials only of bodies but not of minds and souls which only suffer from contact with the bodies they live in! Besides, how would they pass from the human

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tissue in which they inhered to that of the worms and grubs? And how would they reestablish that harmony they require for them and the bodies to thrive in the common cause of feeling? Another difficult problem this theory of transmigration cannot easily answer is how lions are angry and brave, 640 foxes are sly, and nervous deer are inclined to flee. Do these characteristics not come from the dialogue that is carried on, from the start of life, between body and soul? Each seed and each breed displays a fixed set of powers it gets from these repetitions in patterns of growth in the life it leads. The notion of immortal souls that pass from one body of one kind to another of some different breed or kind would produce bizarre and erratic habits. The fierce Hyrcanian hound would flee from the horned stag; the hawk would tremble in fear of the threatening dove that pursued it; 650 and men would grunt like beasts, which in turn would sit and converse about history, art, philosophy, logic, and mathematics. It is also absurd to argue that the spirit can be immortal and yet undergo some change as it moves from a first to a second body—for whatever changes, dissolves and undergoes a death. The parts are merely rearranged? If so,

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they must be capable of dissolution, which means nothing more or less than that they are not immortal. There is a variant form of this position that claims a human spirit must only go to another human, 660 but that hardly solves the problem. How can a fool’s spirit reappear in the frame of a sage? Or, for that matter, why are no children prudent? Why are foals lacking in speed and power? To this, they come up with some preposterous answer suggesting that in a young and tender body the soul is also young and tender. But to that, I reply that it’s different, is changed, and is therefore mortal, having lost its former life, powers, memories, feelings, and integrity of being. How, in any event, can a mind grow strong and attain its difficult goals in life unless it be part of a body, 670 coming into its fullness of powers just as the body does, both growing together from early childhood to flower in the years of adult life? Or why does it wish to depart in the time of feeble old age, when the body is likely to fail? Does it fear being trapped in a rotting and putrefying corpse that will, like a derelict house, give way and collapse upon it? Is that what something immortal would worry itself about?

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Or look at the start of life, and ask yourself if these spirits stand around waiting in some kind of anteroom until beasts should be prompted to perform the act by which their lives 680 begin, or is it the parturition that they attend, that moment when they can perform their trick and enter the newborn’s frame? And how do they work this? Do they wait in line or fight one with another, jostling, pushing ahead, to enter this freshly available body to which they have all swarmed? My view is that what we see is what there is, and that trees do not grow in the sky, nor do clouds float in the ocean, and fish don’t swim in meadows, and the branches of trees, when cut do not bleed. And rocks do not yield tree-sap. Nature has rules, and there is an order and plan to the growth of all 690 things. Mind, therefore, cannot arise except in conjunction with a body, or exist on its own, apart from muscle and bone and blood. If it could exist alone then it could be anywhere—in the head, the shoulders, the heels. But as we know it lives where it must, in the breast of man. From that we can draw the conclusion that it cannot live outside or be disembodied and somehow continue that way to exist. It stands to reason then, that when a body dies, the soul is torn to pieces and it passes away as well. The whole notion that mortal and deathless are somehow yoked 700

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together as partners in thought and feeling is utter folly, absurd on its face, a contradiction of all we know. Creatures thus cobbled together of incompatible pieces could not endure through the trials and storms of human existence. Let us consider what must be the nature of things immortal— they have to be absolutely solid and unaffected by blows, allowing nothing to penetrate them or split them. This is how the atoms, the basic particles, manage to persist throughout all time, as we have already discussed. The void also persists forever, because it is mere 710 space that is unaffected by blows it cannot receive. The only other way for a thing to be eternal is for it not to have any space at all around it into which parts can escape, dissolving or dispersing or from which some kind of body might crash into it— I mean the entire universe itself, the sum of all things. There are those who base their claim that the spirit cannot die on the notion that it is sheltered, protected from the forces of life—because nothing hostile ever approaches to threaten, or else that it somehow repels any such threats before 720 it can be harmed. Our experience shows that this is not true, and minds and spirits sicken as the body does, and it suffers torments of fear for the future or grief or guilt for the past. With what other part of ourselves do we experience madness?

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Or the loss of memory? Or lethargy and depression? And the paradox that results is that death means nothing at all, for if the mind is mortal, then death is of no concern. Before we were born, the world was terrified of Carthage which threatened the tumult of war, and men under heaven quaked in the apprehension of carnage, thinking of those who would fall 730 on land and at sea in the bitter battle. But which of us now is worried? We weren’t there, and we have nothing to lose. And when we are gone? The same immunity will hold, for we will no longer be or be at risk, our bodies and minds having been parted and having bidden farewell to the world and all its cares. Whatever bad can happen, even if earth and sky commingle into some dreadful chaos, we won’t see it or feel it. It’s not our problem. And even if we suppose that some kind of awareness does persist, it won’t be our awareness. The self 740 is what doesn’t continue, once the body and spirit are torn apart. Let them be reconfigured, brought back again after death, and given a new life with the same matter placed and disposed as it used to be, still that life will not be in any sense our own. We would remember nothing of what we had once been— as now we remember nothing of any earlier lives in which our substance somehow might have been a part. What anguish it underwent, what joys, what loves, we cannot even guess about. Look back over the eons, 750

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and in all that endless time with all the motions of matter, try to imagine what the atoms have done and been, even as parts of people. But do we feel any connection? Nothing whatever remains, for in between there was death that brought one life to a final conclusion before this new existence could begin. The atoms danced away from the life that was and then, by chance, some happened again to reassemble to make a new and different person. Or put the question the opposite way and imagine the future, with miseries that will surely burden somebody then. 760 That somebody has to exist at that moment in order to feel the pain or grief. We won’t be there, for death excuses us all from such concerns. And it’s a great relief not to have to bother with whatever trouble may come generations from now. That person cares nothing for us, and we, in return, don’t have to be bothered for his sake. It is death that is immortal, and none of us men and women. Sometimes you find a man who claims that he is worried how, after his death, he may be laid in a tomb, or cremated perhaps, or even fed to wild beasts 770 (as they say the Hyrcanians do). But is he speaking the truth? Or does he really believe that sensations can outlast death? It’s nonsense of course, and, worse, it’s sentimental indulgence. He pities himself for what he imagines could one day happen to the envelope of flesh to which he has grown attached

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and which he can’t imagine taking off and discarding. He pictures it in his mind, and he stands beside it and frets, projecting into it feelings it cannot possibly have. Or worse and more fantastic, he resents that he is mortal and was born only to die. The plain truth of the matter 780 he will not admit is that he will not be there to look on, wring his hands, shed tears, and invite the tears of others. He worries about being mauled by the jaws of savage beasts, but why is this better than being placed on a hot fire and cooked to ashes, or even packed in honey and buried on a marble slab or crushed beneath six feet of earth? Or he thinks of the life he is leaving and how he will miss the kisses his wife and his children give him when he gets home in the evening, thrilling his heart with their sweetness. And his nice house! And his money! To be robbed of all that? “Poor man! Poor man!” he says. 790 What he forgets is that by the same token he’ll be relieved of all his earthly cravings, appetites, lusts, and fears, and he will be finally freed of the sources of all human misery, reaching a grand and lovely indifference. In the tranquil sleep of death he will lie at last, excused from all the troubles we know in this vale of tears, while we, who have survived him, will weep what tears of grief he may have deserved as his body turns to ash on the blazing pyre. Ours is the sadness that time can never entirely heal—

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although we, too, could inquire why we mourn the departed 800 whose lot is better than ours, and pine in extravagant sorrow. You’ve been, no doubt, at those banquets where men in garlands get up, raise their goblets, and spout convivial nonsense bemoaning how sweet life is, but short, and how such moments as this will soon be gone, how tempus surely does fugit . . . The whole routine! But do you suppose that after death what you’ll want is wine? Or canapés? Or bowls of fruit and garlands, for goodness’ sake? What you will not want is this world, or life, or even yourself. With body and mind asleep in that everlasting slumber, no craving at all can touch you. 810 You know how it is when you wake at some loud noise in the night and it takes a moment or two for the atoms of mind to gather together. Now ask yourself how short the distance must be, for they are all still in your body! But after death, they are scattered all over the universe. You need not fear to be wakened, and death, therefore, can’t threaten. You will not be rudely roused to the business of life again after that terminal stop. Nature herself could offer her justified correction, asking, “What is the trouble? Why do you sorrow at death?

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Have you enjoyed your life, and gathered its many blessings 820 into the Danaids’ sieve and been left in the end with nothing? Why not, like a guest at a banquet, fed to satiety, leave gracefully, with thanks, and go to your rest in peace? Or, if your life has been plagued by poverty, ill-luck, injustice, the scorn of your neighbors, why are you asking for more? What reason have you to think it ever will get any better? Ought you not to welcome the end to life and its bitter trials? This is what there is! I have no way to improve your plight or that of mankind! Is your body failing you yet? If not, it probably will. The years will wear out your limbs, 830 your sight will grow dim, and your hearing decrease. Go on and outlive all your friends and loved ones! Live, forever! But this is what that life will be, and has always been.” What answer can you make to Nature then, but to nod in sad agreement? And how do you imagine that Nature would answer the more extreme complaints she gets from those who are old and feeble, rich in years and yet crying all the more loudly that death is staring them in the face? She’d reply, “Ungrateful churl, stop your ridiculous tears! You have had more than your share of life’s empty pleasures and now at the end, you complain? 840

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You want what you can’t have, and what you have had you do not appreciate. Your many decades you’ve taken for granted. And now that Death stands beside you, holding the open door, you don’t want to leave the party. At your age, you act like a baby! Pretend to be a grown-up. Be dignified, if you can!” And there, too, she’d be right, for the old order passes to make way for the new that will now be created afresh. Tartarus’s pit is a dream, a myth. You don’t go there. For the matter of which you are made, there’s a need here in this world that the next generations may come into being and grow and thrive. 850 None of us owns his life, but rather we’re all renters with only a brief leasehold. Those generations before us suffered, but we do not suffer their pains. Nonetheless, we can learn from them that they all have passed away, as we shall, too. Only look into Nature’s mirror and see how the world is. Not gloomy. Not horrible. But peaceful, as our long sleep shall be when the time for it has arrived. Those terrible things the poets describe in the underworld all exist here, in this life, where wretched men may suffer Tantalus’s famous torments, with that rock looming above him 860 to terrify him. That fear is what we have here in this world, and the fear of the gods whose oppression, with or without good reason, like that huge rock overhead, may fall at any moment.

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In the real world, this one, Tityos need not feel dread of vultures gnawing at his liver, for the atoms of his body are scattered about and spread all over the golden globe. He cannot feel pain nor provide any grisly bird food. It is only here, with the living, that Tityos is torn by metaphorical birds, as he suffers in love or in doubt or the anguish of some fateful decision he fears to make. 870 And Sisyphus, too, is here in this world for all to see, eager for power’s symbols, always plotting and scheming, smiling, and shaking hands, the candidate always trying and always defeated. What is that pointless life he leads but the most arduous toil, pushing a rock up a hill, and then, when it and his hopes are nearing the top, it rolls down to the plain below where he must begin all over again? Where, after all, do you think these poets get their ideas? How many of us work hard to satisfy their ungrateful minds’ endless cravings for all the sweet things of life? 880 No matter how much we have, are we ever satisfied? We are the Danaids, endlessly pouring the sweet spring water into our trick-shop urns with holes in the bottoms and sides that we know perfectly well can never be filled, but we seem to be unaware and we scurry and labor forever. And those other fabulous monsters? Cerberus? The Furies? Tartarus belching fire? We know that they do not exist, and yet they speak to us, for which of us is not troubled

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by guilt and the fear that somehow punishment must follow at least as bad as the crime? And what we see in the world that happens out in public—being cast down to death from the Tarpeian Rock, for instance—must be exceeded in Hades. Hot pitch, executioners, torture, and all those ghastly diversions the judges impose on felons scare us and let us imagine an eternity of whips, firebrands, and scourges, the effect of which is to make life on this earth a hell for those fools who cannot distinguish dreams from the truth. What you must tell yourself would have to include the thought that even good Ancus, the fourth king of Rome, at last had to close his eyes on the light, “a far better man than you,” as Homer says of Patroclus’s death. And other kings and great men who ruled over powerful nations have died, every single one. Xerxes, who paved the ocean for his men to cross and scorned the sea’s power, is dead and his spirit has fled his body. Scipio Africanus, who won at Zama, lost his bones at last to the earth as if he had been some slave. Add to them the men of science and engineering, and the painters and poets, the Muses’ companions and devotees, even Homer himself . . . all laid to their last rest

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in the same sleep with the others. Democritus as well, 910 when he realized that his mind was beginning to fail him, chose to starve himself to death, offering freely a life he no longer found pleasing. And Epicurus, this poem’s hero, whose intellect surpassed all mankind’s, who shone with a light brighter than any star and as bright as the sun in the daytime sky, died when his life had run its circuit. Then ask yourself why you should be better or different from these great men, or indignant that death should be waiting for you, too? Who are you? And why should you be somehow excused? You are more dead than alive, sleep through great swaths of time, 920 and snore even when you’re awake. You can hardly distinguish between phantoms and real dangers: your thoughts are plagued with terrors as empty as children’s nursery fears. You are often depressed for no particular reason. You drink too much to dull your cares, but you obliterate your intellect as you drift aimlessly through your life from one idle whim to the next. Consider how most men live, with that terrible weight on their minds that wearies them with its unremitting burden of woe. Why do they live as they do, ignorant of their own desires and seeking always to change places with others 930 whom they suppose to be happy? That man who is bored to death

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in his great townhouse goes forth to find some better amusement, but then he returns home, no better off than before. Or he hitches his Gallic horses and gallops off to his country villa so swiftly you’d think it must have caught fire, but no, he has hardly crossed the threshold when he yawns and falls asleep, or perhaps gets drunk, or else make plans to return to the city. What he is trying in vain to escape is, of course, himself, and no matter how fast he runs, he is just as desperate and bored, an ailing man who cannot even describe his disease. 940 If you could get him to see the obvious truth, how could he not give up his strenuous, pointless hustle and bustle, and perhaps turn his attention to the more satisfying study of the nature of things? What he is worried about, or ought to devote his attention to, is not his mood of the hour but rather the unchanging human condition, how to live in this world, and what to expect in the time after death. What, after all, is this terrible eagerness for life that hounds us and fills us with doubts and irrational fears? We are mortals, which means that our lives do not go on forever, 950 and we all know this and, one way or another, we manage to face death and to die. No one avoids or eludes that end. We scurry and rush amid the things of this world,

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looking for some new pleasure, something with which to sate our persistent hunger, but nothing we happen to seize on will answer the question that nags at us still, and we want something else, something new. Our mouths are always agape and we perish with quenchless thirsts, as we worry what the next year, the next month, the next day may bring. Something good? Or disaster? Or the same old thing? Or death? 960 We all want to live longer, but we know in our hearts that we cannot shorten death’s domain by one drop of the water-clock. Stay well, live long, see grandchildren, great-grandchildren, but death still lurks in an obscure corner of every room you enter, biding his good time. You have an appointment with him and you will start serving your infinite sentence that stretches out as long for you as for him who died many years ago.

Book IV

The air is thin up here and it’s hard to breathe as I pick my way along the heights of the Muses’ mountain, putting one foot after another as carefully as I can. No one has walked this vertiginous path before, and I feel both fear and exhilaration, as I look around at flowers no man has ever seen, let alone gathered to make a chaplet for his brow. My purpose, as well, is lofty— to free the minds of men from the bonds of their superstitions. The subject is difficult, and my verses have to be clear, touched in every line with the Muses’ grace and favor. I talked before of the doctor who puts a dab of honey on the rim of the cup with the bitter medicine to beguile children to drink it down. He does this for their own good, to restore them to health and vigor. My purpose is much like his, 139

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for I want to engage your mind and I hope that this metrical pattern may in some degree soothe and even perhaps enthrall, in order that you may enjoy this arduous adventure to begin to understand the entire nature of things. I have discussed the nature of mind and how it takes its strength from being combined in the body in which it dwells. I’ve talked about how, when the mind is torn from the body, it dies and returns to its first beginnings, the atoms of which it is made. There is, however, one important complication which I must discuss here, the paradoxical nature of simulacra, or, as the Greeks call them, eidola, those images that appear in the mind and for which there are no counterparts in the outside world: projections and dreams, fantasies, and that category of non-existent beings that flit through the air, willy-nilly, drawn from the outermost surface of things and visiting us awake or asleep, in daydreams or nightmares. This is where we perceive pictures of those who have died, which we suppose must be ghosts that comfort or frighten us, depending upon their aspect. Do they exist? Have they somehow escaped from Hades, to visit the world of the living? After death can there be any such insubstantial apparitions remaining, when body

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and mind have both dissolved and returned to the universal welter? I say that these simulacra are the outer shapes of things that constitute a film they throw off in the world. Think of the bark of a tree, which is not the tree 40 but only its outer skin. Or, better, consider how fire emits smoke and heat, sometimes more closely condensed, and at other times less so. Cicadas discard their outer carapaces, and newborn calves will shed their cauls. So does the serpent shed its skin among thorns of bushes where you find them sometimes, like wraiths that flutter and twitch in the wind. If such coarse skins are thrown off, there is no reason to doubt that finer films can also be discharged from other objects. The question is how vision works and the way that things project their images onto a world that observes them. These outer films, amazingly fine, are made up of minute bodies thrown off from the surfaces of things, arranged in the same way 50 they were before, to preserve the look and shape of the object, but clearly faster because they are lighter and less impeded than the heavier solid source from which they first arose. This is also how color is sent from the object into the world—the bright yellow, red, and purple stripes on a theater awning. See how they flutter and tremble over their posts and beams as the dye calls out to the public to lure them

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inside. They also confine the performance within, to sharpen theatrical effects and make more vivid the business on stage. Just as those canvas marquees broadcast their colorful stripes, so do other objects project from themselves an outline, an image of finest texture that flits about in the air. So do smell and heat and other such things stream out from their source to venture abroad, arising sometimes from the depths of the objects from which they come, pushing out into the world whenever they cannot find a proper, convenient escape. But with a film of color, with nothing there to impede it, it is not torn up or disturbed and holds its original shape. In a similar fashion we see images in mirrors or on the still surface of a body of water, and these look like what is before them and therefore these thin shapes must be made of something the primary object throws off. Without that object, no one can perceive a simulacrum that is bounced back by a kind of unremitting repulsion. They cannot be preserved, and yet we know they are there and we cannot otherwise account for the striking likeness. And what are these images made of? All things are made of atoms, which are too small for any of us ever to see, and that, I concede, is not an easy idea to accept,

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but we know that there are minuscule creatures, those tiny mites 80 we can barely make out. Now imagine, what must their eyes look like? Their hearts? Their guts? Their minds and spirits? Those parts are there, but the best we can do with our eyes is to see—just barely— the whole being. And so it is with atoms, where we know from our intellect that they have to exist but our eyes cannot confirm what our theory proposes. That is how tiny they are! It might be clearer to think of things that emit a smell like panaceum or wormwood, or southernwood or centaury, and if you were to pick up one of these things and hold it ever so gently between your fingers, when you put it down 90 you would notice that particles of that substance had clung to your skin. You cannot see them and yet you know for a fact that they are there. . . . but you should recognize that these images move about in many ways, but they have no sensation or power of reason. Along with these simulacra objects give off, there are others that are formed by themselves in the sky or the air and arise on their own. Clouds, for instance, do that, crossing the pristine blue of heaven’s vault and looming down in caress or menace, as if they were giants, or monstrous mountains. They pass, dragging

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their fellows behind them, blocking the sun, and then dissolving 100 or changing or else moving onward in their slow, silent parade. Let us turn our attention now to the speed and ease with which these images happen, flowing off things and gliding away. There is a constant stream of them broadcasting and shooting off from objects, and when they encounter something transparent, like glass for example, they pass instantly through it, but with stone or wood they are broken and of course they disappear. With a mirror, they cannot pass, but they do not break, and, instead, they bounce back quite unhurt, to stream in that direction from which they first arose. All this is amazingly quick, 110 instantaneous even, so that you hold up a mirror, and there the images are, and from this we can infer that the stream of these simulacra has to be a constant flow from the surfaces of the objects from which they arise. Many of these come into being, as fast as the beams of the sun that pour down upon us, and we can also infer that they come at every moment in every direction. No matter where we turn the mirror those images will be there, changing but constant, showing the shape and color of what you choose to reflect. Out of a clear sky, those clouds 120 can occur in a single instant to darken the day and fill us

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with thoughts of Acheron’s gloom, as if it were suddenly night and our daily ration of light had somehow been cut short. Extrapolate from that speed the clouds can manifest to the even greater celerity images have, of which no man can even begin to give a proper account. But how can we offer an even approximate idea of that speed with which images travel, swimming through the air so that in the briefest moment they cross enormous distances? I shall attempt in brief and dulcet verse 130 to describe it, hoping the swan’s short and delightful music is better than the endless honking of raucous cranes as they cross overhead on their annual journeys north and south. Let us assume as a general rule that things that are light and composed of the tiniest atoms are rapid—the light and the heat of the sun, for example, are made of minute elements which pass through the intervening air in the briefest time. What happens is that each atom, struck by a blow from behind, accelerates, and the light comes up that way against light and flash follows on flash in an interconnected chain. 140 Images too can run through space at an inexpressible speed, because they are prompted along by the impulse of what is pushing them onward, and also because they are rarefied and gauzy and therefore able to ooze their way through the air.

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Consider too this factor, that heat and light from the sun come from the depths of that body and glide and spread themselves in a moment of time throughout the vast space of heaven over land and sea, and fill the entire sky above us. What then of these images here, cast off from the surface, merely, with nothing to impede their discharge or their progress? 150 They travel, therefore, faster and cover a greater distance in the time it takes the light of the sun to fill the sky. As a demonstration of how impressively rapid these images are, let us consider a lake or a pond, some body of water, the surface of which reflects light. You can see in the smooth water the constellations above answering back in their twinkle in the pond’s motionless water. You see, here, how the image came down from the distant heaven to appear again almost instantaneously on earth. And from this you may infer the rate at which images move. 160 . . . and everything we see must be discharged and must flow from bodies to strike our eyes and stimulate our vision. So, too, there is a constant stream of aromas from things, and cold from rivers, and heat from the sun, and energy from the constant surge of the tides and waves that devour rocks along the shore. Sound, too, flies through the air, and voices.

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Sometimes when you are strolling along the shingle you taste salt in the air and even feel the ocean’s moisture. You can watch from across the room a person mixing wormwood and water and, at that distance, your mouth will begin to pucker 170 receiving across that space the concoction’s bitter flavor. From all things, then, there are various qualities that disperse in all directions and flow with no delay whatever, and we can see and smell and taste and hear their sounds. Finally, in the dark, you can handle an object, touch it, and feel the shape and texture that you recognize as the same as what it had in the light. Suppose the object is square and you touch it and in your mind the square image appears. These images, these simulacra, are how we perceive things in the world we encounter, and without them we know nothing. 180 These images that scatter abroad in all directions we perceive with our eyes and, wherever we turn our heads, they strike us in all their richness of shapes and colors. The marvel of how we see is that we are able not only to distinguish what a thing is but also how close or far away it happens to be. How this works is that as the image streams through space its movement creates a current of air that passes

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through the pupils of the eye, and from the force of that puff of air we can estimate the distance the image traveled. The farther off it began, the greater must be the air 190 it drives before it. And all this happens at such a speed that we are unaware of the process of calculation but we gather the information instantly. It also happens that when we see this image stream, we perceive an entire field of all the objects that happen to stand together. Imagine the blast of a cold wind blowing upon us. We do not feel each single constituent puff but respond to the whole stream at once. And so with simulacra, we receive an entire array of objects that broadcast themselves to give us the perception of what its body must be. 200 Suppose for the moment that someone is walking along a road and he stubs his toe on a stone. He touches the outermost surface and sees the outermost color, but he also perceives the hardness and even the weight of the object, and knows its innermost depths. A tricky part of this process is how images in mirrors seem to be at a distance beyond the mirror’s surface. The same rules apply, of course, as to things in the real world. Suppose you look through a doorway from inside a house: you see many things and distinguish at once their several positions.

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What happens in this case is that there are two distinct 210 currents of air—the one outside the door frame, and then another, between the frame and your eye. So, too, with a mirror: its frame works like the door frame, with the image throwing itself forward toward your eye, and you perceive this before you see what’s in the mirror, which also carries its current of air that is flung back at double the speed. This is why objects appear to be at twice the distance between you and the looking glass. With the mirror as with the doorway, the process involves two separate currents of air. You also perhaps may wonder why a mirror image 220 appears to us in reverse with the right-hand side on the left. The explanation is that when the image hits the flat surface of glass it does not turn around but bounces back. Imagine that someone hurled a glob of wet plaster against a fluted column. In the front it would keep its shape, but the back, the part that had hit the column, would show a reverse view but with every detail it had encountered, and what formerly was on the right would now appear on the left. It is also of interest that images bounce from mirror to mirror, so that if these are properly placed, even five or six 230 likenesses may appear, turning this way and that, through the winding rooms and halls of a house, and every time

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the image reverses itself, the left becoming the right and then, at the next, returning to what it had been before. In a concave mirror, however, with the curvature horizontal, the image corrects itself to return the right on the righthand side because it bounces twice against the reflecting surface and the curved shape of the mirror restores the original image. And finally, let us suppose that you stand before a mirror and move to the left or right. The image, of course, will follow, 240 mimic your every gesture no matter which way you go, the angle of incidence the same as that of reflection so that nature bounces it back wherever you happen to stand. Now let us turn to some of the aspects of vision, the way, for example, that eyes avoid excessive light. The sun, as we know, will blind a person who stares directly at its unbearable brightness. Because of its great power, the light comes through the air at such a speed as to strike and injure the eye, disarranging its atoms in their very delicate structure. It is also true that this fierce brightness carries the seeds 250 of fire, which will of course cause pain as they penetrate the eyeball and, inside it, burn the tender tissues. A person afflicted with jaundice has seeds of yellow-green suffusing his body and these stream out to combine with incoming images, therefore producing by their contact a lurid puce or greenish tinge to whatever he may be looking at.

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Suppose for a moment that you are in some dark room, looking out: you can see quite clearly. What happens is that the darkness, being nearer, has entered your eyes, but then the brightness immediately follows, dispersing the black shadows, and this it can do because brightness is much stronger than darkness, more mobile, and made of finer elemental pieces. Thus, it can fill the eyes’ channels with light and open them up from the closure of black air that had occupied them. The opposite holds, however, when you stand out in the light and try to peer into the heart of darkness and cannot, because the grosser particles that make up the darkness will fill the apertures of the eyes and let no images enter, no matter how they attempt to impress themselves upon you. It sometimes can happen that you may look at a distant city’s towers you know to be four-sided, but they appear round, their corners blurring to look as though they were curved. The strength of the image’s blow has been blunted by the distance, as it travels through space and the air that buffets it and roils it. So it is that the angled coigns and corners smooth

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as if they had been somehow turned on a giant lathe, even though we are certain, from having seen it close-up, that the angles are there, sharp in the slabs of light and shadow. Speaking of shadows, we ought to consider how our own move in the sun and appear to follow along with our footsteps, 280 imitating whatever gestures we happen to make. What we call our shadow is air deprived of light, for obviously the earth is deprived at point after point of the light of the sun where we have obstructed it. We move, and the spot we have left fills up again. It therefore seems that what we took to be our shadow is what persisted and followed us along—but these are a series of shadows, with new rays being blocked and then filling up the space. Think of a wick that seems to burn but at every instant it’s a new piece that in truth has just been ignited. So 290 is the ground deprived of light that is then restored as new light pours down to wash away the passing blackness. You object to this? You say that this would tend to impeach the testimony your own eyes have supplied? Not so! They tell the unvarnished truth and report where there is light and where there is not, but whether it is the same is not the eyes’ business. That is only the mind’s perverse view, an interpretation that may or may not be correct. Is the shadow the same or different? Does each manifestation

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of a constantly changing process necessarily mean that the shadow cannot change? How would the eyes know that? We have learned how to read the information the eyes provide on many occasions. We’re on a ship that appears not to be moving at all, but the hills on shore do seem slowly to change position. We know that this is wrong, and therefore we make a mental adjustment. Or look at the stars in the great vault overhead that seem to be fixed in their places, even though we understand that they’re really moving. The sun and the moon, too, look to be fixed in the sky, but we know from having seen them rise in the east and set in the west, again and again, that they are in constant motion. Back on the deck of that ship, you peer out over the bow and what you think you see is a line of unbroken hills, but the pilot understands, having traveled this route before, that there is not one large island but rather two with a channel between them through which an entire fleet could pass. As children we learn to question what our eyes seem to be saying— for instance, in some rough nursery game involving rapid spinning to make the players dizzy. The room appears, after they’ve fallen down, still to be turning, wheeling around and around, even tilting as if it could fall upon them.

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Another common example of how the mind can fail to interpret correctly the information that it is receiving is, when at dawn the light of the sun first appears in the east to emerge from the crest of a mountain with that first glimmer of fire, it seems for a while as if that mountain must be quite close, a couple of thousand bowshots, or a few hundred javelin throws, but we know perfectly well that a vast stretch of the sea intervenes between it and us, with many islands and cities and many nations, and forests where beasts rove. 330 Better yet, think of a situation in which you know for certain that the little puddle there in the street at which you look down is no more than a finger’s depth and yet you can, if the light is right, stare down into the water and see on the surface an image as deep and as high as the clouds far, far above you as if that puddle were some small ocean. And think how it is on horseback, fording a river: the horse is standing still, but the river is flowing along his withers, and if you look down he seems to be flying along upstream. We all know well the phenomenon of columns of equal 340 height that stand in lines in a colonnade, where they seem not only to diminish in size but to come together so that their parallels appear to meet in the distance, not only left and right but the roof and the floor as well, as if they were part of a cone. And we know that this isn’t the case.

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Back to that ship again, where the sailors on watch on deck see that the sun pops up out of the water’s surface, or, at evening sinks into the western waves, although they have learned not to believe what their senses say every day. Another example of how the information the eyes 350 convey requires the mind’s proper interpretation is how a ship in the harbor will seem to have been damaged, for the parts of the oars that are not in the water are clearly straight while those that are submerged are bent at unlikely and useless angles. But when the oars are raised they are once more straight. And at night, in the sky, when there are puffs of scattered clouds, you can look up and see how the stars seem to glide among them at speeds and directions you know are only the moment’s illusion. You can even conduct your own experiments with vision, putting your fingertips beneath your eyeball and gently 360 pressing against the eye. Objects appear to be doubled: people with two faces and bodies—or are they twins?— sitting on double chairs where they are lit by paired lamps, none of which had been there a couple of moments before. It can also happen in early morning when you are asleep and, although your body drowses in comfort under the blankets,

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you think you are awake, moving about in the light, and instead of the dark room there is sunshine, sky, a river, perhaps a looming mountain, and you walk along and listen to sounds of birds and perhaps your own eloquent speech, 370 all of which your brain has supplied in a vivid dream that fills the darkness and silence of the room you are actually in. These and many other instances I could adduce to show that there are quirks and marvels that tend to make us doubt the reports of our senses, but we learn to disregard these curious paradoxes, because we realize that error comes not from the eyes but the mind itself that takes the information in and deals with it incorrectly, so that we see things that are not really there, or we fail to distinguish the truth from these doubtful additions the mind has made. 380 There are some who throw up their hands and say that we cannot know anything for certain. But taking them at their word, how can they know even that? Do they not contradict precisely what they assert? It’s a frivolous position that hardly deserves a reply. Nevertheless, I ask them if they do not trust their senses or the truth of material things, how do they know “knowing” or distinguish it from its converse? How do they know “unknowing?” What do they mean when they speak

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of “true” and “false?” Or even the “doubtful” and the “certain?” What I maintain is this: that the very notion of truth 390 that cannot be refuted arises out of the senses to which we appeal as the standard, the way we combat falsehood by offering in its stead what men have seen for themselves and are therefore inclined to agree to. Even our reasoning process begins with the senses. How can we then use logic to argue against what the senses report? If the senses themselves deceive us, than all logic is false. Will the ear impeach the eye, will the sense of touch refute what the ears have reported, or taste, or touch has announced? Will the nose disagree with the eyes? I cannot believe that this can happen. Each of the senses 400 has its own function, its own domain, and from them we learn what is hot or cold, or what color or shape a thing may be. Taste resides in the mouth where it has its particular power, and smell and hearing contribute their own information. Can one of these refute any or all of the others? Or, for that matter, can any one sense refute itself to contradict a report it had already made? Of course not! What the senses tell us at any given moment is their incontrovertible truth upon which we all rely. There are, it is true, examples of optical illusions 410

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in which a building we know from close hand observation is square may appear to be round. But these are particular problems that reason can resolve. What we want not to do is to let slip from our hands the manifest truth of the senses from which all observation and reason must always start. Doubt of the senses leads to utter chaos, the fall of all possible knowledge of the basis of our existence. 410 Never mind philosophy, you could not get up from your chair and safely cross the room. Life itself would collapse and the precipices that threaten would not be mere metaphors. Any argument trying to deny the truth of the senses is a vain array of words, foolish muttered phonemes. Consider a building in which the architect’s straight-edge is warped, the square is off, and the level is slightly wrong. The house will be a fiasco, sigodlin, askew, out of proportion, and about to collapse, betrayed as it was from the very beginning by rules that were out of true. So must your reasoning fall 420 if your first assumptions are wrong and not based on the senses. Our next subject, of course, is how the senses function, and this is not at all a stony or difficult path for us to tread as we look at how each of them works. Sounds and voices creep into the ear canal and strike with their bodies

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on the delicate membrane deep inside. It therefore must be that sounds and voices have bodies and exist as physical beings. We know that this is true from other observations, for sometimes when we cry out in a hoarse manner, the sound of the voice will scrape the gullet and irritate the windpipe. 430 It is when the atoms of sound gather in large amounts and issue forth from what is a rather narrow passage that they scrape the insides of the throat and the mouth. And what can cause such pain we must assume is composed of bodily parts. Think of how, when a man delivers a long speech that goes on all through the night to the first light of dawn which has driven away the dark shades to reveal his weary face, his strength is gone, and his voice is a raspy croak, especially if his style is of oratorical excess so that he has declaimed at no insignificant volume. 440 The voice he has projected is a part of his very body, and so much was taken away as to leave the remainder weakened. As we all know, there are smooth voices and also rough ones, which we can explain with the notion that the rough voices are made of rougher and larger atoms, while smooth, mellifluous sounds are composed of small, smooth atoms. The blast of a hunting horn is all rough-hewn and its bellow strikes the ear with a force

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that is almost painful and then its echo returns from the hillsides with an eerie buzz. The swans in Helicon’s valleys are loud but sweeter in the mournful tones of their haunting threnes. 450 The sounds that arise from our throats, the body sends into the mouth where the cunning tongue and teeth and the lips do their short-order work, shaping the sounds and imposing upon them the forms of words. If the hearer is close, these words are clear and distinct, but if they must travel over a great distance, they blur as they glide through the air. You can still distinguish the sounds but you may not be able to understand the meaning, the words having been somewhat confused and degraded in the course of their journey. Consider, however, another interesting thing that happens with speech, when a single word from a man making an oration 460 goes out to a whole crowd, and into each pair of ears the single voice must travel, dispersing that way into many separate voices, each one impressing upon the ear and mind of every man and woman out in the crowd a clear and meaningful message. Many, of course, but not all, for there may be some in the back to whom the sounds have traveled a long way through the air, scattering, breaking up,

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bouncing perhaps off the walls, and they will be much less clear, delivering not words rather the ghosts of language. That bouncing off, by the way, is the explanation of echoes, 470 for sometimes out in the woods alone, at a mountain’s rock face you can call out a single word or even a whole sentence, and the rock will bounce it back, clear, in the right order. There are even places I’ve seen where the echo will re-echo six or seven times, the words flying back and forth as if they were trained falcons showing off for their master. The country folk know these places, and make up pretty stories of satyrs and fauns and nymphs who lie there in wait to tease us, entertaining themselves in their merry woodland revels. Sometimes they even claim to have heard the fairy pipes 480 and sounds of the plucked strings of their violins, while men all round the glen cock their heads to listen to the faint but marvelous music of Pan and his acolytes who run through the meadows and woods and mock us with their tunes— or is it an invitation? What do these stories amount to that men bandy about with one another? A wish that these nursery dreams might be true and that we could hear the music if only we were lucky enough or listened harder.

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But back to the subject. How does it happen that sounds can pass through places where images cannot maneuver for us to see? 490 We can hear a conversation behind closed doors, for instance, and the voices pass unobstructed, through tortuous passages while the images cannot, because they have to split up unless it some transparent substance like glass that they swim through. But sound operates in a different manner, spreading in all directions, and seeding as sparks of fire do to beget other fires elsewhere. This is how hidden places are filled with voices as air boils with sound that stirs and mixes around. Images travel in straight lines, which is why, if you cannot see over a wall, you can hear 500 voices over and through it, although they may, in a house, be blunted as they travel from one room to another. The same line of thinking explains the intricacies of taste and how the tongue and palate perceive flavors. We chew food in our mouths and in doing so we extract the tiny bits that have taste, in much the same way as one would in squeezing a filled sponge extract the water it held. What we have extracted is carried throughout the entire mouth where the passages in the tongue’s spongy surface admit these particles. When the atoms are round and smooth, the taste 510

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is sweet and pleasant, their touch on the taste buds being gentle, but sour or peppery substances, made up of rougher atoms, prick the senses and even tear the soft tissues apart in direct proportion to how rough are their first beginnings. The delights of flavor do not extend beyond the palate and, as soon as the food has passed down to the throat and stomach, there is no further sensation of taste as the nourishment travels to all parts of the body. It seems not to matter at all what we use as fuel, so long as it can be digested and does not upset the stomach or irritate the guts. 520 It is worth the mention that not all people perceive the same flavors from foods. What some think sour and bitter, others find absolutely delicious, if piquant. The maxim about one man’s meat being another’s poison is true, literally, and the difference among all creatures is even greater. Aristotle tells us that men’s saliva is poison to certain snakes that will gnaw themselves to death if spat upon. Hellebore is poison to us, but goats and quail thrive on it. How can we explain any of this? We must go back again to the idea of how things are made 530 with many atoms mingled in various combinations. Now creatures differ from one another in how they are fashioned, their contours and shapes are different, and their internal organs and channels,

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and so must their mouths and palates be made of different atoms, triangular or square, some round, even polygons, and some of them larger than others, in many different arrangements. Therefore what is sweet to one kind of creature could be bitter to others, for species in which the disposition of atoms is congruent will like what they eat, while others will not, depending on their shapes and their differing motions. 540 The animal takes what its palate tells it to like, and that is conditioned by its structure that welcomes certain foods that are healthful but not others, sweet, sour, or bitter. We can see in ourselves the changes that happen whenever we fall ill, when the fever rises or bile overflows and floods the system. The body’s internal balance is thrown awry and the atoms change their positions and therefore their interrelations, and taste changes so what was agreeable formerly now is not. The rough and the smooth atoms affect the tongue in different ways, so that honey, for instance, can taste bitter. 550 Now odor works in a similar way, and the nose is fitted with receptors to which the streams of atoms arrive from the various things that emit aromas that flow in all directions. But different creatures are better fitted to detect different smells, because of the conformation their noses happen to have.

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Bees, for instance, are known to be drawn over a great distance by the perfume of the makings of their honey, and vultures are keenly aware of carrion’s faraway stench. Hounds can follow the scent that beasts with cloven hoofs have left on the ground. And geese are amazingly good at the smell 560 men give off, as we know from the time that the gaggle sacred to Juno alerted Rome to the oncoming Gallic invaders. Each creature is thus equipped to find the food it needs, and the contrary is true, that the smells of loathsome poisons repel those beasts and birds that are subject to their harm. Now a given smell may be carried farther than some others, but none can travel as far as sound can do, or an image that can cross enormous space to stimulate our eyes. Odor wanders about, arrives in a languid fashion, and gradually fades, dispersed by the air’s movement. 570 We can understand why this should be the case, for odors arise and spread only with difficulty, coming apparently from the hearts of things. We know this is so because an object’s smell is stronger when you have broken the thing open, or ground it down, or burnt it up, which suggests that smells must come from deep inside. Then, too, it must be true that the atoms of smells are larger than those of sound, because smells cannot pass through a stone wall as sounds can do. This is also the reason that odors, drifting slowly through the air, can lose much of their force. 580 You’ve seen keen-scented hounds having to cast about for the faint trace of a stag they are chasing for their master.

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As it is with smells and tastes and colors, there are certain sights that repel some creatures but not others. I think of the rooster who, at dawn, crows farewell to the night and his welcome to daylight, flapping his wings in pride. We do not find this a source of terror, and yet the lion, a fierce beast, is dismayed and thinks at once of fleeing this hideous apparition, no doubt because of some odd atoms in the rooster’s body, and therefore its image, 590 that speed into the lion’s eyes and bore their holes, causing the huge cat pain, which, for all his courage and strength, he cannot endure. But humans are not affected, either because these seeds do not penetrate our eyes, or else, if they do, they exit at once and do not linger to cause us any trouble, let alone physical pain. We turn our attention now to a most important subject, which is how images reach the mind or arise from within it. Images, as we have already talked about, are floating in all directions, thin as spider webs or beaten 600 gold, to unite in the air when they meet and combine together. These images, I suggest, are even thinner, taking their aim at the vision and penetrating the apertures of the body to activate the mind’s inner substance and stimulate the sense. Thus, we see the Centaurs, monsters like Scylla, faces of such fierce guard dogs as Cerberus, ghosts of those who are dead and whose bones rest in the gentling earth. How is it that these things can register in our vision?

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Some arise on their own, others are made of random pieces of images floating about to combine, for surely 620 there never was a living Centaur for any person to see, but there are indeed men and horses too, and their images met at random, combined, and cohered to produce a picture in the mind of what a Centaur must be. All other such phenomena happen in just that way, meeting and bestirring our minds in a single impression, for the mind is delicate, thin, and extremely easy to prompt. It stands to reason and, indeed, it has to be so, that what we see with our minds is like what we see with our eyes, and the images therefore arise in exactly the same fashion. 630 Suppose I perceive a lion. Is a lion really there, its image assailing my eye? That would be my assumption, and I should expect that the thin image the lion projects is what my eyes have received and my brain has interpreted. But now suppose I’m asleep, and I see the lion again, that same image arising from where my mind had stored it. I am asleep and cannot refute the phantasmal beast, or the ghost of my uncle, of whom death and dust have been masters for many years. This is what happens whenever our reason is obstructed by slumber, inert, and unable to contradict 640 the unimpeachable truth that my uncle is long dead, and that vision I think I see cannot be more than a dream. The fact that my uncle seems to be waving his arms and moving about as he used to do in life is hardly strange,

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for what the mind has stored is not a single image but a series, each of them slightly different, so that he looks to be moving as the images change and flow together. There are many questions about the mind that deserve attention, and we shall try to address them and make these matters clear. The first is how the mind can think of whatever it wants to. 650 Do images somehow wait on our will to be summoned up and then present themselves? We can imagine the sea, or a pleasant meadow, or the entire earth, or the heavens, or whatever we want. We can choose to imagine crowds of men, at banquets, parades, or in battles. Does nature have all these ready, conscripts who can rise up at a word from any of us, while others are thinking of other spectacles or tranquil scenes, altogether different? You can imagine a dancer, and there she is, performing, putting her feet down right, and moving her elegant arms in perfect alignment and timing. 660 How can this happen? How can our dream images know what we will want, and when, and always be ready for us? It would seem to be altogether impossible, but it happens. On the other hand, you listen to somebody talk, and a word he has pronounced not only tells you something but triggers other words you expect him to say, or that you might use to answer his remark. The mind is a rich storehouse, and at any given moment, words are there, and phrases,

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and images as well. When the first one appears and fades, there are countless others ready to take its abandoned place. 670 Because each is so thin, we cannot distinguish one from the next, unless we consciously act to interfere with the streaming. Otherwise what happens with language happens also with images, for which the mind expects a series and prepares itself, and also satisfies itself. You have seen people squint, trying to sharpen their eyes’ focus and concentrating their attention. This is what happens when we are awake. And what you do not expect or look for, often you do not see. It also happens of course, that our expectations will fool us, leading us to see 680 what isn’t there, or to miss what is there, or to deduce the wrong thing from the physical evidence before us. In sleep it can also happen that the images change abruptly, and what was a man one moment becomes in the next a woman, or a child becomes an old man. If we were not asleep this would seem strange to us, but slumbering, defenseless, with our critical faculties lulled, we simply accept these changes. There are people who suppose that utility will explain how the body is formed, and they look to an organ’s function to account for why it is there and how it works. This is wrong. 690 Do not suppose for a moment that the eyes were made for seeing,

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or the feet and calves were fashioned so that we could walk and run, or our arms and hands were put there so we could perform the tasks that life demands of us. This gets everything backwards, and what these people are doing is making a logical error— or teleological error—mistaking effect for cause. Nothing came into existence in order that we might use it, but rather these things created the use to which we put them. You’ll admit that before there were eyes, there could not have been sight. There was no speaking of words before there were any tongues. 700 The tongues came first, and these we learned to use to form words. Before there were ears, there were no sounds to hear, and, indeed, the various members existed before their uses, which we, over time, discovered, and learned how to perfect. Instruments made by man, our own inventions, are different, for surely there was fighting before we invented arrows and spears, and defensive devices, like shields for the left arm. We all lay down to sleep when we were worn out from the day’s exertions, and only later did someone come up with beds, pillows, and mattresses. And thirst no doubt predated 710

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cups. All these devices that man figured out arose from some perceived need and a clever idea to fill it, but to extrapolate from these contrivances to a different class of things is wrong. And Aristotle is wrong to suppose that biological organs were made that way. Each organism requires nourishment to grow and repair the wear and tear of living, and every creature knows, without being taught, what food it ought to seek out. We have already discussed the way the body throws off images of itself and other sensory signals, 720 always in quick succession, and some of them expressed from the organism’s depths in sweat and exhalation, and the whole creature is weakened, exhausted, and even in pain. For this reason it needs food, as a rickety building needs to be propped up, repaired, and bolstered, its cracks and chinks filled up. Ample fluids are also required, for the various parts of the body in which heat can collect— the stomach for example—the flames there must be extinguished so that occasional burning may not destroy the entire edifice. What you feel is a great thirst you must slake, 730 until that craving from which you suffer is satisfied. Now we address ourselves to the question of how we move, walk this way or that, lug our great weight around, and maneuver ourselves through space. The first thing that has to happen is that an image of movement arises somewhere in the mind.

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What takes place then is that this image engages the will, whereby the possible movement is transformed into intention so that the mind bestirs itself and sends out its signals to the mass of spirit spread out everywhere in the limbs and frame. This is easy to do, since the mind and spirit are closely intertwined. The spirit then signals the muscles and bones, and then the body moves, its whole mass pushing onward. Besides, at this moment, the pores expand so that air can enter the body and penetrate through all the opened pathways to all the smallest parts, and the limbs and the air can act together to move the body along, as a great ship is moved through the waves by the wind’s pressure upon its sails. That such small elements work together to move such a large mass is not surprising. Think of how fine is wind, and the size of the ships it is able to push through the difficult billows with only a single human hand on the tiller to guide it. Or think of how a machine with its cogs, wheels, and levers can lift an enormous weight with almost no effort at all. Now we turn to the interesting question of how we sleep, which I shall address as well as I can, briefly and sweetly, again preferring the songs of the swans to the cranes’ honks.

740

750

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What I need from you is a keen, willing attention and a heart that is not hardened to words of unfamiliar truths or averse to revising some of its earlier judgments. What happens when we sleep is that part of the spirit departs, 760 while part of it withdraws into some hidden depths. Then do the limbs relax, loosen, and turn flaccid. Which of us can doubt that the spirit is involved, and that, when sleep hinders our feelings, the spirit is somehow disordered? But not altogether, for then the body could not survive, and it would succumb to death’s unending chill. What we have instead is like a fire that’s banked and covered over with ashes but ready to be revived to rise again throughout the limbs and the frame, as we know a fire can be revived to its previous liveliness. 770 But the question remains as to how the spirit can be disordered so that the body falls into its languid drowse. I shall try to explain the way in which this happens and hope that my thoughts and words are not lost to the winds. To begin with, the body, like any other body, is hit by ambient breezes and atoms that float about in the air. This is why nearly everything is protected by some outer skin or shell or carapace or bark. But the same air is also inside us and it buffets us there when we breathe, inhaling and then exhaling, and inside the lungs the atoms 780

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are also battering there in those tiny passageways. The result of these constant assaults, inside and out, is collapse through all the limbs. The atoms that make up our organisms are disarranged and we feel fatigue as part of the spirit is cast forth into the outer world or else recedes to its hiding places inside. The mind and spirit, no longer combined in their usual way, cannot cooperate, for the usual paths are blocked and sensation buries itself deep within so that motions are difficult to achieve. With nothing supporting the limbs, the body weakens, the arms and legs fail, and the eyelids flutter, droop, and close. 790 You have also noticed that after a large meal you are sleepy, and this comes about in much the same fashion, for food is spread through the veins and passageways, with its atoms beating and joining the tissues within, the effort of which affects the spirit in the same way, producing its withdrawal to greater depths, and, divided thus from the mind, the result is the same lethargy and fatigue, to recover from which, we nap. One of the fascinating things about dreams is that whatever the preoccupation has been, whatever the passion or calling of the person, will reappear in his dream life. 800 Lawyers are arguing cases, and generals order their dream battalions this way and that on the field of battle. Sailors

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as they are sleeping, fight with the shifting winds and waves to keep their oneiric vessel from swamping and going down. When I dream it is either of how the world works or else of writing verses in which I present my findings in lines that are never quite pleasing enough. Other men’s dreams involve whatever they have stored up from their strenuous daytime efforts that comes back at night to continue and either worry or soothe them, for what they have observed in the daytime has formed a series 810 of mental connections through which those images can return. Sometimes even awake, those images will enter to offer, say, a performance of dancers and twangling lutes on a stage that is not there but is always there, with lights, and even with the fancy paraphernalia of stage sets. And it is not only men who behave this way, but all creatures who, as we see from their sleeping twitches, dream of what they like to do. Race horses dream of running and even break out in a sweat and pant as if on the track as they try to reach a finish line that they know must be there. 820 Dogs, too, will jerk their legs, and even bark for a chase that is going on in their heads while their snouts sniff and twitch

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trying to find the trail. And then, if you wake them up, they will even dash off to catch the elusive quarry to which they were so close in the dream that has not quite faded. Guard dogs have different dreams and growl to protect their masters, the household, the territory, and the fiercer the dog, the wilder and more impressive the threat. Birds, too, I hear, can dream, and suddenly take off from their perches to try to avoid the hawks that have been swooping down in their apprehensive 830 visions to threaten them as well as their helpless nestlings. Men behave in the same way, so that those who have power pursue great schemes. Kings in their beds conduct their battles and win much land and treasure, or else are captured and marched in chains among mocking strangers. I’d suppose one can hear them cry out in rage or fear just before the headsmen slits their helpless throats. They struggle and groan in pain from the bites of the panthers or lions their foe has set upon them to amuse the bloodthirsty crowd. Sometimes at the prospect of torture they confess their innermost secrets, bear witness against themselves, 840

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and dishonor themselves and their line. Often men fear falling and believe themselves to have slipped from the top of a treacherous mountain; they hear the horrid whistle as they drop down through the air; and they wake just before they hit and smash on the rocks below. But the terror remains for a moment, or more than a moment. It takes some time for them to recover themselves in their beds in their rooms. Men who are thirsty dream of fresh running brooks that they almost drink dry without ever slaking their parched mouths. Small children who have to go will dream of their potties, and believe that they’re being good, peeing into the proper 850 receptacle, but they wake and the rich Babylonian blanket is soaked (again?). And we all know how young boys will dream when puberty comes upon them, so that their bodies are ready, and images of some girl in their classroom or drawn on a wall, with a lovely smile and a wink and the sweetest tits in the world excites them beyond endurance, and they flood their pajamas and bedclothes with a sudden gush of semen that’s a damp mess when they wake.

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This brings us, however crudely, to the larger question of love, or rather let us focus the discussion on sex and desire, which are complicated enough. A young man comes of age 860 and his body grows in size and strength, and he feels the power of impulses that have not impressed themselves on him before. The seed arises, arrives from the whole body, and gathers into the genital parts to excite them and cause them to swell. He feels the desire to send it forth to what has occasioned this sudden powerful craving, the mind having been wounded, as the poets say, by love. And the metaphor is just, for a soldier will often fall in the direction from which the wound came to him, and he spurts out blood in the blow’s direction sometimes even to splash on the enemy that dealt it. 870 So, too, when one of Venus’s shafts has caused a wound, whether it be from a fuzz-cheeked boy with a girlish pout, or a woman who radiates love from her whole sumptuous body, he tends toward the source of the blow and desires to unite and project from body to body amor’s humors, desire, sweet in itself, having promised an even greater delight. This is our goddess, Venus. From this comes all the fuss and babble of love and passion. Her wicked droplet trickles into the heart and produces madness. The one you desire

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isn’t around? But her image haunts you. You can’t escape it. Her name resounds in your ear. But obsessions like that are not healthy, and you would do well to turn away if you can. Do mathematics. Or at least shoot your wad elsewhere. If you keep it all inside, it will curdle and addle your wits. You’ll feel great pain, and yet you’ll even love the pain, and the wound of love will fester, get worse every day if you do not find other wounds to distract you and cure the first and gravest. For these injuries from Venus, only Venus offers relief, and you must learn to look in other directions. You don’t need to be in love to enjoy the pleasures of sex. Its pleasures are even greater when they are not tinged with frenzy. In the lovesick fellow’s confusion, he loses all finesse, his kisses are long and hard, and even hurt as his teeth grind on hers and his lips devour more than caress. In his madness that is combined with pain and pleasure, he wants to hurt as well as delight, and his passion gets in the way rather than turning him into a more accomplished performer. What he is trying to do, whether he knows it or not, is somehow to extinguish Venus’s searing fire. But nature does not work that way, as he soon enough learns, and while we can eat or drink our fill, with sex the craving

880

890

900

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only grows greater and greater, the more we indulge ourselves. Venus offers only a temporary relief, in a moment’s satiety that never lasts and a brief hope that the burning fire may be extinguished, but no, nature is not so gentle with us. We may dream of water and never slake our thirsts, but with sex it is in the waking world that we cannot achieve our longed-for fulfillment but only a wan hope that is quickly snatched away, as the merciless goddess, Venus, mocks us. A picture is not enough, 910 but it makes us want to see the body of the one we love, which is in turn never enough either. Now we must touch it, rub our hands upon it, grope it in all its hollows and curves, taste it, and enter in, and even that is not enough, for after the climax, there we are, still clinging to one another, still greedy, even though our limbs have relaxed in a sweet exhaustion in what turns out to be a brief interruption, but then the burning begins again, and the frenzy once more is upon us to attain what mortal flesh can never attain, which shows, 920 if there were any doubt, that love is utter madness. But look again, expanding your view of these poor demented victims. See how they nearly kill themselves with their labors, give up to each other their freedom, neglect their own obligations,

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and hear themselves joked about or scorned by their friends for this foolish indulgence in such excess. Whatever wealth he had goes to expensive perfumes from Babylon or the slippers the Sicyonians make—not for bedrooms but only fancy boudoirs. Emeralds set in gold flash on her fingers. Her tunic is purple, delicate, and it doesn’t 930 last, torn off so often and soaked with Venus’s sweat. The hard-won wealth of the father dribbles away in scarves, tiaras, silks from Ceos, or is spread out on the table in dapatical displays with the richest cuvées and flowers festooning the walls in a vain profusion that cannot distract the stings of a guilty conscience. He knows this is all insane but cannot help himself. He is wasting not only his substance but his life, too, and he hates it, and what can he do but look to her for help, for debauchery’s all too brief anodyne? He stares at her across that priceless tablecloth 940 and frets that she’s making eyes at some of the other guests, smiling too much, and laughing louder than she needs to. But then, what did he expect? Or is it only his own yearning turning against him to fill his heart with suspicion? And that’s what happens when things are working out well in what we call a happy outcome. Think of the alternate case, where the love is not returned and the lover pines in sorrow, hoping for that consummation that will do him, of course, no good at all. But does he ever admit that?

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Not for a moment! Instead he takes to his bed alone— 950 alone!—and suffers absurdly, as people do all the time. Therefore, pay attention, and don’t ever lower your guard. Avoid being lured in the first place into the snares of love, which is easier and safer than trying to extricate yourself from the strong knots in which you find yourself tied. And even then, if you feel yourself at all entangled, you still can make good your escape, if you do not stand in your own way, by overlooking her faults, and every woman has plenty of faults if only you bother to pay attention. She isn’t what you see, blinded by your desire. 960 Just look at the women other men have fallen in love with, not all of them beauties. Some are wrinkled, or crooked, or squint a little. And you can’t tell the besotted man, because he simply can’t see it, the poor buffoon. You suggest he pray to the goddess to help him escape from a ludicrous passion that everyone else in the world laughs at, but he doesn’t get it. His blackamoor is “a nut brown maid,” or his rank sloven is a model of “sweet disorder.” The green-eyed girl is a “Pallas,” the skinny one’s “a gazelle,” the dwarf is “one of the Graces, and a wonderful wit”—which somehow you’d never noticed before. 970 The fat girl is “statuesque” or else “has presence,” and she who stutters is “shy,” while the stupid one he thinks is “modest.”

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The prattler is “the life of the party,” the anorectic is “svelte,” although she looks more than half dead of consumption. And the bosomy one with those humongous Winnebagoes is “an earth mother, a Ceres, who just gave birth to a Bacchus.” The snub-nosed girl? “A dear little monkey face.” You know the drill and can do your own euphemistic translations. But never mind, for in truth it doesn’t make any difference, and even the knock-out beauty isn’t unique. He can find 980 others as good or better. And he’s lived his life until now without this person, however gorgeous she happens to be. And what she does and says and how she behaves are not much different from a homely woman, dabbing the perfume, while her maids conspire and giggle. Meanwhile the poor sap is keeping them all busy with the huge bouquets he sends that they have to arrange and put into vases. He’s outside kissing the doorpost he has anointed with marjoram. But should they let him in, he’d gag with the floral reek and would find some more or less lame excuse to get the hell out of there. 990 He might even come to his senses, wake up, and see what a dope he has been for the past few days. And you think the women are stupid and have no idea how much of their lives they have to keep hidden

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from all their love-sick puppies they want to keep beguiled? But no rational man can be taken in by their tricks, and anyone with a brain can join in the maids’ laughter. What you want is a women who is decent, generous, not an absolute nuisance. Settle for that? Or rather rejoice, for all of us are mortal with some share of human weakness. Lastly, let us turn to a rather delicate question: it is not the case that women always fake orgasms, for sometimes—and with some, often—their sighs and cries are real as they embraces their mates and they join, body to body, and drink one another’s kisses. Straight from the heart (or wherever), these exclamations come of a mutual joy that rouses him to further heights of pleasure. Look at the kingdoms of birds and beasts and think how cows and mares and ewes submit to the males of their kind, which they would not do if their own pleasures were not involved. They come into heat, as we say, and they are indeed on fire as they thrust against the penis of the mounting bull or stallion or ram. Their mutual pleasure is also clear from the fact that sometimes they have some trouble disengaging. Often, dogs in the street will pull

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with all their might in opposite ways but are still held fast in Venus’s sweet grip. We cannot suppose this would happen if they were not both involved with a shared enthusiasm. In these acts of copulation and mingling of seed, when the woman is ascendant and overcomes the man, then it is her seed that dominates in the children which resemble her as those in whom the father’s seed is dominant will resemble him. Some children possess characteristics from both their parents, and this can happen because they grow from the seeds of both of them, stirred up and joined together by Venus’s passionate goad, neither one being conquered or conquering, but both, breathing as one, contributing to what will be the offspring. It can even sometimes happen that a child will be born who looks like a grandfather or mother, or even a great-grandparent, because in the parents’ bodies these seeds had been concealed or mingled in many ways, and they now express themselves. These first beginnings can be passed down so that the child has his grandfather’s hair, or voice, or cast of eye, which grow out of those seeds as surely as faces, bodies, or limbs.

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It is also true that female children can spring from their fathers’ seed, as males can come from their mothers’, for birth is always the product of their conjunction. One may preponderate or the other, and some features will make themselves manifest so that you can recognize them, whichever gender the child. Some men lose—or never had—sexual powers, and these go to the altars of gods to pray that they may father lovely children and not pass their days in a barren marriage. Sadly, these men will sprinkle blood on the altars and make their burnt offerings, hoping the deities grant abundant seed with which they may impregnate their wives. But none of this works, and the gods are either indifferent or maybe bored. These efforts at prayer and pious magic have nothing to do with the fact that their seed is either too thick or too thin, and in either case it cannot function the way it should. Watery seed cannot adhere and it flows away without producing a child, while that which is too thick and closely clotted cannot reach its goal or else it cannot penetrate and mix with the woman’s seed. What is required in this most delicate interchange

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is a sexual harmony where the man and women are matched. Some men are more likely to impregnate certain women than others, and by the same token, some women can better receive their burden from one kind of man than they can from another. A woman who, in her first marriage, never got pregnant, might in her second find herself bearing many children. And similarly a man whose wife was barren has found 1060 that with a new mate he is able to father offspring to protect his old age. Thus, we see how important it is that the man and the woman share compatibility, matching so that their seeds can commingle, the thick mixing with thin, or the thin with the thick, in a way that fosters procreation. To some extent, the diet can affect the thickness or thinness of seed, some foods tending to concentrate it and others diluting it to the thinness it may need for its proper function. For those who are trying to start a pregnancy, much depends upon the position they take in intercourse, for wives 1070 are likelier to conceive if they take the position of beasts, kneeling so that their breasts hang down and their vulvas are up to receive his seed more deeply and into its proper place.

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The erotic gymnastics of hookers are of no use whatever here, for the whore’s purpose is giving the most pleasure while running the least risk of getting herself knocked up. Blow jobs or taking it up the ass are good for the working girls in the brothels. Either way, they don’t have to worry much about the bother of having a child, and they drive the men crazy in ways our wives don’t need to know about. Sometimes a man will love a plain woman or even a homely girl, but it’s not that the shafts of Venus have struck or some other god or goddess has interfered. The truth is that charm counts, and good manners, and cleanliness, and neatness, and it’s no trouble at all to live with a woman like that. What counts in the end is time and the habits people form. Love arises from that habituation: a blow, however slight, if it’s struck over and over again, will have its effect, as drops of water will wear away over the months and years the most perdurable stone.

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Who in the world is wise enough or graced with the requisite talent to undertake a poem that might be worthy of nature’s majesty, its intricacies, its wonders? Or who can presume to praise the merits of that great thinker who won for us such treasures and bequeathed them to all mankind? No one, I think, of all the sons of mortal man, for what we are describing is nothing less than nature’s secrets and him who first unlocked them. I believe he was as close to a god as we ever are likely to get, my dear and noble Memmius, and I celebrate Epicurus who opened these doors for us, explained the nature of things, and also gave us a reasoned plan of how to live for which no other word is adequate but Wisdom. 189

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What was murky and dark before, he made pellucid, and the rough billows of thought he leveled to a smooth surface of calm reason and tranquil contemplation. Think of the great discoveries celebrated in myths, of Ceres, for example, who introduced to mortals the agriculture of grains, or of Liber, who taught us how to ferment simple grape juice and turn it into the wine 20 we drink at our tables. But even so we could have survived without those innovations—as the Germans are said to do. But the good life, the well-examined life, was hardly possible without a mind that is purged of fears and desires, for the secret of which we owe the great Epicurus as much as we owe any god. His wisdom spreads among the world’s nations and peoples with sweet consolations we need and solace for troubled souls. Do you suppose for an instant that Hercules’s great labors were any match for his? Assuredly not! The maw 30 of that terrible Nemean lion is no longer a threat and none of us has to fear the tusks of the Caledonian boar. Do you look over your shoulder to see if the Cretan bull is about to charge? Has the Hydra of Lerna troubled anyone you know? Is the three-headed Geryon, the titan, high on your list of concerns when you wake in the morning? Are the Harpies now the gossip in the marketplace, or the vile man-eating horses of Diomedes who breathed fire somewhere in far away Bistonia, long ago? That dragon that guarded Hesperides’ apples does little mischief 40

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in our neighborhood, and who goes that far east these days? Those monsters have all been conquered or killed, and if any remain we have not recently heard news of their depredations. There are, indeed, wild beasts that swarm on the mountainsides and creep through the depths of the jungles, but we can avoid these places. But if the mind is not cleared, what savage battles await on every side? Lust in its lair lurks ever ready to pounce and tear the tender flesh to bloody pieces. Pride looms with its poisons, and petulance gnaws from within, ready to devastate the moment’s equipoise. 50 Gluttony tempts and sloth insinuates itself, inviting a sympathetic yawn from the innocent victim. But the man who has learned to defend against these blandishments and knows how to fight them off, not by the sword but by words of his own mind, will surely attain to the joys of the gods, free to turn his attention to discourse about the good and cultivate his knowledge and love of the nature of things. Epicurus’s steps I follow, enabled by him to teach in this poem of mine how things are bound to obey the laws by which they were made and the rigid statutes of time. 60 The first of these teachings concerns the mind itself, which consists

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of a body that had a birth and could not have pre-existed or persevered through the eons. It is only in dreams that we see an image of one we know to have died that may confuse the intelligence, but we know never to trust such visions. What the poem must then undertake is how things in the world are mortal—die and are born. We shall examine how it was that the mass of matter first established the earth, the sea and the sky, as well as the sun and moon and stars. Then we shall look at how life began and the animals first arose from the earth. (Some did; others never appeared.) We shall see how the human race began and how speech came to let us communicate by using the names of things. We shall also describe the way that fear of the gods first crept into human hearts to prompt us to maintain their holy shrines and at pools and in woodland groves establish altars and temples with their images painted and sculpted, idealized, staring down. I shall explain how nature directs the course of the sun and the moon, too, to disabuse you of such thoughts as that they can move on their own, or that their progress affects the growth of crops here on earth, or the herds and flocks we keep. Nor do these heavenly bodies perform according to some

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direction of gods—for as I have made clear already, they lead lives that are altogether free from any such cares. Still, some people revert to the ancient superstitions and invent taskmasters whom they assume to be almighty, all-knowing, and immortal, having no idea of what in the world can be and what cannot, and that there are borders and limits in both logic and nature to each thing’s powers. But enough of this prospectus. Let us look first at the sea, the earth, and the sky, that make up the world’s tripartite nature, each of these forms of being so different and yet all three so interwoven that all of them face the common threat of eventual ruin, this mighty and very complex world being mortal and therefore subject in time to death. I am well aware that this is a strange and unsettling doctrine, Memmius; still I believe that it is so, and that indeed destruction impends on heaven and earth. It’s a difficult idea to prove by argument alone, for this is something novel that people cannot touch or see for themselves, which is where the high road of wisdom runs straight to the hearts of men for intelligence to accept. Still, I shall make the attempt, and my words may win some credit so that you will come to expect strong earthquakes to happen that will convulse all things—although my most fervent hope

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is that such events as these may not take place right away. It is only to reason that I appeal rather than to clearer empirical demonstrations, but the world is bound one day to collapse upon itself in an unbelievable crash. But before I deliver these solemn oracles with even greater conviction than what the Pythia feels on her tripod with Apollo’s crown of laurel set firm upon her brow, let me first offer some words of consolation and wisdom, lest you suppose that the earth, the sea, and the sky, the sun, the stars, and the moon are divine and will therefore last forever. Those who are inclined to such beliefs go on to suppose that any person who, by logic’s powers, shakes the world’s foundations as the Giants did should suffer dreadful tortures for having committed such monstrous crimes as quenching the light of the sun in heaven and tainting immortal things with mortal speech. I deny this altogether, for the things of this world, after all, have neither emotion nor motion, and therefore cannot be worthy of the notice of divine presences or be the manifestations of gods. It cannot be the case that mind and understanding reside in every body. There are not, in the upper air, trees, for example. The sea does not have clouds. The fish do not graze in meadows. Wood does not drip blood,

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nor does sap ooze from the stones. It is fixed and ordained where each thing can exist and thrive. Thus, there cannot be mind without a body, separated from sinews and blood. If it could happen that way, mind could be in the head or shoulders or down in the heels, or in any part of the body rather than in the breast, which is its proper vessel. If even in our bodies there is a place appointed in which the mind can dwell, it only stands to reason that it cannot exist outside the body—in clods of mud, or the sun’s fire, or water, or the lofty realms of air. Therefore these cannot be endowed with divine feeling since they have no animation and are not what we’d call “alive.” Another idea to which you ought not to subscribe is that the holy gods could exist anywhere in this world. The nature of gods is thin and far removed from our gross senses or comprehended by our intelligence, since it cannot be touched by our hands, which necessarily follows from the fact that it cannot even contrive to touch itself. The places where they abide must therefore be different from ours, thin as their bodies are thin. But I shall return to this question later on to explain and prove, I hope, my contention. There are some who maintain, however, that the world’s intricate structure

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was made by the gods for the sake of humankind, and to praise the world’s splendors is therefore to give thanks and praise to the gods. They say, too, that the world, having been created by divine and immortal beings must be itself immortal, a gift to outlast time that may never be disturbed or have its foundations shaken by arguments such as mine, which undermine both the world and also men’s faith in the gods. But this position, or rather all these positions together, are foolishness that serious men cannot accept, and I urge you, Memmius, my dear friend, to pay them no mind. 160 What do the gods need from us? What thanks, what praise are they likely to want? And why should they do such things for us to get such expressions from men of appreciation and awe? Were they not happy before? Tranquil? In perfect contentment? Why should they want to exert themselves in such a project, change their lives, and tinker with paradise? What boredom or dissatisfaction could they imagine, let alone feel? When existence is perfect—as for them it has to be— why mess with it and therefore risk it for novelty’s sake?

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And had we and our world never been made, who would complain? 170 Can you suppose some strange condition in which we wallowed in darkness and misery waiting for the light of the first creation? It doesn’t make any sense! I admit that whoever is born and lives may prefer to remain alive as long as the life is tolerable. But those who have never tasted the light cannot yearn for it, have no idea what they’re missing, and could not resent or object to not being brought into being. Then, too, I find it hard to think that even gods could imagine the world as it is, or mankind, or have some design or plan of atoms and how they could come together to form 180 things with their various powers and motions by their change of position, if nature had not already been there as a model for all creation. Think of the infinite number of atoms and how, over time, they meet and bump apart, in an endless and random series of combinations from which they produce, by their rearrangements in all manner of ways, all manner of things that exist, the universe that is constantly changing, renewing itself. But even if I had no idea of first beginnings and how they work together, it still would seem clear

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to argue that our idea of heaven and what we see 190 in the world are too far apart for anyone to attribute this to that. And why? Because what we have here is riddled with obvious imperfections for which the immortal gods would not wish to take credit, or, more to the point, blame. I mean, look around, and the vast sky covers a world most of which is useless, with huge inconvenient mountains, forests full of ferocious beasts, rocks, marshes, swamps, and dangerous oceans that separate sections of land. And look at the lands, how some are scorching while others are frozen almost all the time. And of what remains, the ground 200 is still covered by brambles and useless weeds that men have to attack with hoes and mattocks, sweating for each little plot to turn it productive and cleave and plow it. And come to think of it what would happen if farmers did not break their backs out there, cultivating and weeding, and watering when they have to, what useful plants would be born and grow to sustain mankind, of their own accord? And if somehow they could seed and sprout, how many of them would survive the droughts, the storms, the violent winds, the frosts that come out of nowhere to ruin crops and threaten famine? 210 Why are there implacable beasts on the land and deep

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in the sea to threaten us? Why do the seasons change to bring us down with diseases? Why is there sickness and death everywhere to stalk us and unprovokedly pounce? Look, too, at how we are when we first come into the world as castaway sailors who haul themselves up on the shingle to lie there naked, exposed, hungry, thirsty, and utterly helpless. As soon as nature casts the baby forth from the womb into the world of light, it fills the air with dolorous wailing, which we sadly acknowledge as right and proper, 220 considering what hurts and griefs await all men in the course of our all too brief passages here in the world. Do other animals need this care? The flocks and herds and the creatures out in the wild bring forth their young who are ready to fend for themselves. They do not need rattles to play with. They eat without ever being coaxed, and do not have to be changed every few minutes. They do not need lessons in their language but already know the various noises their species uses. They have no need to be guarded or tended as human babies always do, for nature provides for them in abundance 230 and with elegant precision brings forth whatever they need. Let us review: the earth, the sea, the sun’s heat, and the winds

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that compose the sum of things all consist of bodies that are born and die. We are therefore led to suppose the entire world, of the same structure, is also mortal, for whenever we see a creature that is made of parts that are born and are subject to death, then we conclude that the whole creature must be subject to death as well as its component parts. We look around and see the world’s members dying and born again, and we cannot doubt that heaven and earth had their time of beginning and face their time of ending. I’m not begging the question or making this up—for earth and fire are subject to death and water and air perish and then are reborn and increase. It’s not hard to see this happen in those vast desert places where incessant suns have scorched the ground to powder and numberless feet have trampled their paths so that a cloud of dust arises that winds pick up and disperse through the wide sky. In other regions the dirt is washed away by excessive rain and the rivers nibble riparian tidbits that water carries downstream. But whatever is taken away here returns sooner or later to be deposited there in punctilious repayment.

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The earth, as we know, was our mother and also will be our tomb, and what is diminished in one place grows again somewhere else. This explains how the springs and rivers forever well up to pour their abundant waters down to the waiting sea. There is no cause for concern that the sea bed will overflow, for little by little the water is taken off but the sum total remains the same. Strong winds sweep the surface and the rays of the sun bake down to diminish the great substance, 260 while elsewhere through deep channels some of it drains away to come up gushing or oozing and starting all over again, beginning where it began before, but now with the salt filtered out so the water is sweet and fresh again. Consider now the air, which, at every hour, changes itself in numberless ways, as whatever in things expires is mixed with the ocean of air that surrounds us all the time, and from that all things draw the particles that they need, renewing themselves in this constant flowing. All is moving, circulating, and changing, as new air is generated 270 from things which in turn inhale from this process of constant change. The source of light is likewise constant, as we can determine by looking at how the sun is constantly pouring its rays with a fresh supply of light to replace those it has sent

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that have reached the earth and are spent and gone. Each bit that falls is resupplied. You have seen clouds collect in the sky in such a way as to make clear how the rays come down from the sky but their lower parts disappear and are lost, and the earth beneath the clouds is in shadow for their looming. Things need light to prosper and grow and for each ray 280 that is lost more must be supplied, and without the sun’s unceasing production, where would we be? At night we can cope at least for a while by hanging lamps and lighting torches, where oil or pitch will provide some light and a fair amount of black smoke, too, but they do bring new sources of brightness to the room with their fitful flames that nevertheless continue, each lamp giving off rays, one after another, in such quick succession as to make it seem a constant flow. So, from the sun and the moon, there’s an endless supply of rays each of them fresh to replace what went before. 290 But you should not, for this reason, believe that any given pulse of light is indestructible in itself. You see that even stones, given enough time, fail, and tall turrets fall, and huge boulders will crack and crumble: not even they can defy the laws of nature. And the monuments of men? They too all fall to pieces, grow old, and decay into dust. Even the mountains we call

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ageless turn out to exist in time and will shed large hunks of rock that they can no longer maintain and that roll down to the valleys below, overthrown by the force of time, surprised, having endured impervious until then. But the question is even larger than that of mountains or seas. Consider the totality of things, the vast sky that holds the earth in its embrace as it makes itself from atoms it later discards. The entirety also is a body forever coming into being and then declining to death. I cannot doubt that if the universe works this way, creating, destroying, remaking all the time, then it, too, must be subject itself to birth and death. Let us now take an altogether different approach and ask how, if there was no birth of the earth and the heavens and if they have been this way forever, why have there not been poets celebrating those early events? We know from Homer of course of the war against the Trojans; we know of the attack of the infamous seven against the walls of Thebes. Men do noble and awesome deeds, and flowers of fame blossom on the mounds of the dead, but we have not found evidence of earlier battles and civilizations. The obvious explanation is that the world is new and young, and no great time has elapsed since its beginning. Even now we see how the arts and crafts are being

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developed and perfected, and some are just beginning. Look at how there have been great strides in the building of ships since our fathers’ time. Musicians likewise have invented their intricate tunes only lately. This view of the world I’m proposing is recent—and I am the first to set it all forth in Latin. On the other hand, let us suppose that you reply with some story of how things always have been the same, but that generations of men lived and worked and died in some catastrophic drought or scorching heat, their cities 330 cast down in some great upheaval, earthquake or flood with waters cascading down from rivers that overflowed their banks to wash away all traces of what had been built. I will accept all that, because it proves my point— that destruction comes at last to everything under the sky, for if such disasters occur, such dangers and great afflictions, then that is the way of the world. The way we know we are mortal is looking about at others who, one after another, sicken and die with diseases that are after all the one disease of being mortal, fated as all things are 340 to pass away from life and return to the swirl of atoms. What lasts forever must be of absolutely solid structure so that the blows it receives can do no damage, neither penetrating or disturbing its inner construction, which is how the atoms are. The other eternal case in which the assaults can do no harm is that of the void

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which remains, of course, untouched and invulnerable to blows. The universe, too, one can argue is also eternal, having no space outside it to which things could disperse and dissolve, and no possibility either that from outside it something 350 could come from somewhere else to batter or assault it. But the world is not a solid body, but rather has voids that are intermingled among the solid atoms. Likewise it is not, itself, a void, but is chockablock with things that can, by chance and at random, combine from their infinite number to overwhelm the sum-of-things with storms and tornadoes or other such disasters. There is, moreover, space into which the stuff of the world can be scattered or from which stuff can come to assault and even perhaps destroy it. Death’s door is therefore not closed to the earth, the sea, and the sky, 360 but they stand as we do ourselves at the brink of the gaping maw. And if it all can end, then it all must have begun, and it owes respect to time from then up to this moment. Another aspect of this large question is how the four elements seem to fight with one another in endless conflict, stirred up in a most unrighteous civil war. One cannot help but wonder what would happen if one should emerge at the last as the victor. If the sun’s fire prevailed and drank up all the water, as it has been trying to do,

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where would we be? But the rivers pour forth more and more water into the sea, as if to flood the world, and they would, except that the winds sweep the ocean’s surface, and the sun’s hot rays beat down to prevent their overwhelming the earth with merciless waves. This warring goes on all the time, and the contest is well matched, but once it looked as if fire might triumph over the others, and once water was king at least for a while over the meadows and fields of the earth. The story about the fire is that of Phaëthon’s journey with the sun’s horses out of control and running away, descending from the sky to touch the earth when the Father of gods, in annoyance, threw a thunderbolt at him and smashed him, but Helios caught him up to enfold him into the lamp of the everlasting sun, and then caught the horses and yoked them, calmed them, and restored them to their usual path. The poets do this elaborate number to explain the vast Sahara. All that, of course, is nonsense, but it remains true that fire in the course of time can bring its bits of matter together in greater than usual number—but then it subsides again, or, if it doesn’t, the world burns up from its scorching blast.

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There are also children’s stories about an enormous flood that all but washed away the human race, but the gods relented for whatever reason, and, for the moment, we were saved as the waters receded and the rivers diminished again. The time has come for us to turn our attention to how the agglomeration of matter established the earth, the sky, the ocean, the sun and moon, and the rest. It was no foreordained blueprint the atoms had that led them to place themselves by some astonishing show of intelligence in their proper places; they did not bargain with one another, agreeing on which motions each would take to perform its tasks. Because there were so many first beginnings, they struck, bounced off, piled up, were carried along by their own momentum from infinite time to the present, trying all combinations at random, and now and again some of them would work as the start of some great thing—the earth, the sea, the sky, and all the generations of various forms of life. Back then, at the very beginning, there was no sun soaring across the wide sky and shining its generous light. There were no constellations wheeling around heavens, nor even earth and sea and air as separate domains, but an indeterminate mix of all these first beginnings in an endless storm and in such a disorder that among them there was a constant war, blows, meetings, motions,

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and now and then impossible aggregations that could not last but soon collapsed back into that primal soup. But after the passage of time, these atoms somehow achieved an organization that had at least the basic divisions in which the land and the air, the sea and the sky became distinct, as like with like combined and parceled out a primitive form of the world that we now take for granted, 420 with the fires up in the sky in places we think are their own. What had to have happened was this, that the heavier atoms collected, became entangled with one another and soon sank, squeezing out the lighter and lesser particles, making separate collections of earth and air, of sky and sea, which are composed of smaller and smoother elements than earth. From the interstices in earth they rose up and broke away, drawing with them the atoms of fire—as we still see happening all the time. Get up early one morning and look at the dawn to discover how mist forms and rises 430 with the earth seeming to smoke in a wonderful exhalation from the lakes and rivers and ponds. These come together to form the clouds we see overhead that cohere and assume a shape that sails in a languid movement across the blue of the sky. It must have been something like this when the earth and the sky were formed, with the light and the air rising up and expanding in every direction

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to fence in what was below as if in a gruff embrace. These events were followed by the sun’s and the moon’s formation of atoms not heavy enough to sink down into the earth, nor light enough to continue to rise, glide away, and join 440 the overarching ether of the uppermost regions. These bodies therefore remain where they are, suspended halfway, revolving like living bodies and yet in some way remaining in a stable relation to other parts of the whole of things, where some members remain at rest and some are in motion. Now when these large bodies—the sun and the moon— were withdrawn from the mass of the earth, the remainder at once subsided and the ocean flooded in to fill up those deep expanses and the hollows were filled with water. Day by day, the tides of the air and the sun’s rays further compacted the earth 450 with frequent blows from all sides to pack it more tightly together in the shape of a big ball. The more dense it became, the more did the salt sweat ooze out of the muck to flow into the seas to drown the marshes and plains, and atoms flew up into the shining regions of sky. At last, when the process settled down, the plains remained, and mountains were pushed up to their present beetling heights, for the rocks could not sink down, nor could all the various part subside

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at the same rate and to anything like the same degree. The end of the process is what we see all around us, the heavy earth, the mud of creation, pressed together to settle down at the bottom; the sea and the air, made up of fluid particles, lighter, floating higher. Highest of all is ether above the breezes, invulnerable to storms and tempests that toss and turn whatever they like, while the ether glides with an unchanging and tranquil sweep on high, its movement slow and unswerving, like the Black Sea’s constant current. Let us now turn our attention to the motions of heavenly bodies, their causes and effects. To begin with we see that a great circle of heaven revolves, and we must assume some pressure of air upon the poles that holds it steady and lets it turn as we know it does. More air flows around the circle spinning the constellations all in the same direction, as a river-wheel turns and raises its buckets. To be candid, there could be other explanations, assuming a heaven at rest and in it the constellations moving because of the way the tides of ether are constrained. The stars, then, try to escape and blaze through the night, while air from some other place propels them and fans their twinkling fires. One might even imagine stars moving ahead on their own across the sky in an endless search for the fuel

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they require in order to feed and sustain their internal fires. And which of these ideas is the accurate one? Who knows? We’ll find these things out in time, I am sure. The point is that there has to be some logical explanation, some cause, that what we know about other parts of nature all of which works in the same way with the same laws, not only here on earth but up in the sky, applies, and knowing that we can hope one day to understand more of what is clearly coherent and rational and true. 490 That the earth is here in the middle region of things suggests that there must be something heavier underneath us, joined from the very beginning to carry the weight, and above us light and airy parts that maintain the equipoise. The weight of all balances out, in the way that a body carries limbs and head with ease without even feeling their burden down in our feet that support and move the entire frame. But weights that come from outside we do feel as a burden, or at least as a nuisance, even though they may be smaller. What is important is whether the weight is a part of the body 500 itself, rather than something alien and external. In this way we can reason that the earth was not simply imposed

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on the air from some other quarter, but all of it grew together, conceived at the same time and brought to birth as coeval parts of a universe, as our limbs are parts of us. That this is only common sense, our observation ought to make clear. We have seen in thunderstorms a bolt of lightning shake the sky and the earth in the same motion, which could not happen unless all were bound up together, joined by their common roots from the very start of existence. 510 We also see how the spirit, light as it is, sustains the body for all its weight, because they are joined together and knit into one. How could you possibly jump up into the air, were it not for the power of spirit to guide and prompt the compliant muscles that operate the limbs? From this we may conclude that even a thin nature may be joined with a heavier body. So air is joined to earth as the spirit and power of mind are joined together in us. The disc of the sun in the sky and its heat are what we see and feel on earth, for distance does not diminish heat 520 or light, so the size is what we behold, what reaches our senses on the earth that it lights up. You do not need to adjust, adding or subtracting, but accept what we can observe. The moon, whether it shines on its own or with reflected light from some other source, is also the size that we see, no larger than what it seems as we look at the sky at night. Things that we see at a distance through air appear to be blurred

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before their size is diminished, but the moon, as we see it, is clear and sharply defined, and therefore we may conclude that what we see overhead is its true size, shape, and proportion. And finally, inasmuch as fires we see on earth do not seem to change their size very much—as long as they continue to burn—so we may assume that fires in heaven are what we see, no matter how great their distance, or if there is a difference it must be extremely small. Nor should we wonder about how so small a thing as the sun can emit enough light to fill the lands and seas with light and suffuse heat, for this is the one fountain from which comes the generous flood of all the brightness and warmth. What happens is that the elements of heat gather together from all parts of the world to flow from the single source as sometimes you see from a small spring there is water enough to flood the meadows and rivers that wind through the fertile fields. It is also perhaps the case that the sun’s fire may not be great in itself and yet its glow may pervade the air with hot burnings it kindles, amplifying the heat much in the same way that a small spark can beget an enormous conflagration of straw or stored grain. Another idea is that while the sun shines on high with its light,

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it also has more heat that we are unable to see and that does not shine but nevertheless comes down to warm us. By the same token, there is no single reliable theory to explain how the sun moves from Capricorn to Cancer and visits upon us the changing seasons throughout the year. Nor do we know for certain how it is that the moon moves, waxing and waning, over the course of a month, while the sun’s course requires a year for it to complete. Democritus has an explanation—that the nearer a body may be to the earth, the less it is carried around by the sky, since the force of that motion decreases as you get to the lower regions. For this reason, he argues, the sun is left behind because it is lower than other heavenly bodies. The moon is even lower, nearer the earth, and is carried along with a fainter whirling movement, so the other bodies catch up and pass her—and she seems to be moving slowly backward, but only in relation to the faster signs in the sky. It is possible, too, that from other parts of the world, two currents of air may flow across the path of the sun, each one at its own fixed time, one of them strong enough to push it away from all the summer signs as far as the solstice, and the other to throw it back from the icy regions of cold toward areas of heat in a never-ending cycle. In like manner the moon and the stars, revolving in orbits

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of various sizes are driven by currents of air this way and that, as we see the clouds driven by winds sometimes in different directions in different layers and heights, the lower going one way and the higher going another. Is it not also a possible explanation of stars in their constellations moving through their great orbits of ether? And what happens at night when the earth is covered in darkness? It has to be one of two things. Either the sun has reached the furthest extreme of its journey and, wearied and weakened, puts out its fire, having passed through such an amount of air, or else, as some maintain, it continues around beneath the earth’s surface to rise again in the east in the morning, having been carried along at night by the same forces that moved it across the sky during the daylight hours. In the morning, then, when Aurora spreads out the rosy dawn, it follows that either a new sun has formed itself in the sky, kindled afresh with the seeds of light and heat that flow together at an appointed time to create a new sun, or else the old one, having returned from under the earth, reappears in the east, to kindle the new day with the same rays as before. It is difficult to tell, but they say that at Ida’s top you can discern at dawn a number of different sparks that assemble to make a sun, a single globe to rise in the sky and give us light.

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It’s an odd but interesting notion, and not at all absurd, for the question of how these rays assemble at just the right place and time is not an impossible one to answer, or at least we can point to similar phenomena in nature. Wander sometime through an orchard and see how every tree knows when it’s time to blossom, or time to shed their blossoms and come into leaf. Or do not venture so far, but remember when you were young, and how your baby teeth all knew when to fall out. Or your beard knew when to come in. Lightning, snow, and rain come at their usual seasons year after year. From the time of the first beginnings, this has been the case and the causes are there, running the world in a regular sequence and order and at quite predictable times. Sometimes the days increase and the nights, of course, get shorter, and at other times, the nights are long and the days are short, and one cannot help wondering what could cause these changes. Perhaps, the same sun, running above and beneath the earth, does so in curves of unequal length, the orbit therefore being unequal, giving back more to day or night as the season calls for, until it arrives at that point where the nights and the days are equal. We can assume that the winds

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of the north and south hold steady the turning points it follows along the Zodiacal course that takes it a year to complete, casting its light obliquely or directly depending upon its position in the sky. This much have men determined mapping out the regions of sky that it has to traverse. The other explanation would be that the air is thicker in certain places, and therefore the gleams of the morning fire take a longer time to assemble and then to arise, and that for this reason the nights in the wintertime are longer but at last the rays converge and give us the light of day. Or it may just be that at different seasons the atoms of fire are faster or slower to come together to make the sun rise up someplace in the east, and those who maintain this view . . .

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It may be the case as some have maintained that the moon reflects the rays of the sun, waxing, waning as she recedes from the sun’s orb, and then shining full again. As she rises up in the sky, she can see it setting, and then as she moves in retrograde she loses its light more and more as she glides closer and closer to it. Those who take this position assert that the moon is a ball and the path of the course she keeps is below that of the sun. It has also been suggested that the moon shines on her own, 640 and those who take this view offer various explanations

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of how it waxes and wanes, and where the light may come from. Some say there may be another moving body that glides along in the same path as the moon takes, obstructing our view of it somehow, although it has no light and we therefore cannot see it. Another thought that makes a certain kind of sense is that the moon rotates and it is a round ball, half of which is shining while the other half is not. The turning of this globe would account for the changing phases that we can see from earth. 650 At one point the part that is bright with fire is turned toward the earth, and then, little by little, the sphere revolves and the dark half comes into view—or would if only we could see it. This notion is that of the priests of Babylon who argue against the astronomers’ claims, as if one account were certain and the other therefore false, or as if they had some evidence by which they could prove their theory. It is not out of the question that the moons we see in the sky in their different shapes may not even be the same moon but a series, each of them new, just made, in the succession 660 we see in other aspects of nature. How do we know that each night’s moon does not vanish to be replaced by another in a different position? It’s hard to disprove, and it does account for what we see in the sky over time. Think of how the seasons come on in their procession with Venus, Cupid, and Zephyr ushering in the spring

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and strewing the ground with flowers’ colors and sweet aromas. Then comes dusty Ceres with summer’s heat and winds that blow down from the north. Bacchus leads in the autumn with a different set of winds. Then Auster, the south wind comes, 670 the lord of lightning, and we reach the year’s shortest day when snows begin to fall with numbing winter’s frosts, in which our teeth chatter with the all but unbearable cold. If this is the model, then it could be the case that the moon is born afresh every night as one of those things that recurs, produced in an orderly sequence that is, after all, widespread. Eclipses of both the sun and moon are another problem, events for which there are several plausible explanations. Why should the moon be able to block the light of the sun getting in its way and obstructing his burning rays 680 with her black disk? Why should we not as well suppose that some other unseen body that does not give off light might not be gliding along to produce the same result? Or is it the sun that grows faint, losing its fiery powers at certain fixed times, and then, having crossed those regions that are hurtful to its flames and quench them for a time, then it recovers vigor, renewed and stronger than ever? And why, for that matter, do we conclude that the earth can steal the light from the moon by passing above the sun to reduce the moon to its subjection, sailing across the cone-shaped 690

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shadow that earth casts? Why can’t some other body pass underneath the moon, or block out the sun’s rays, intercepting its light? How do we know that the moon does not pass through some region hostile to her shining so that she grows faint and then recovers herself? Having addressed these difficult questions of how the sun and moon move and behave in the sky in their various courses and how their light at times can grow faint or be obstructed so that the unsuspecting world is covered in darkness as these bodies appear to wink and then, with open eye, 700 gaze again upon us, let us return to the subject of the infancy of the world and how the soft fields of the earth brought forth what they thought fit into the light to commit these creatures to the tender mercies of wayward winds. To start with, the earth gave forth different kinds of plants, verdure that covered the meadows and gently rolling hillsides. Not long after, the trees began their struggles to climb high into the air. We have seen how birds and beasts sprout feathers or hair or bristles as they mature. So, too, did the newborn of the earth put forth their leaves and branches, 710 saplings first and then the taller and taller trees. After the trees, the living creatures were brought forth, in their different kinds by different processes, for it stands to reason that they did not just drop out of the sky,

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and that land animals did not emerge from salty pools. So if they did not come from air or water or fire, then earth must be the mother of all the living creatures. Even now there are some that arise from the earth, worms that are formed somehow in the dirt by rain and the heat of the sun. It is not then altogether surprising that larger forms of life should have been created when the earth and the air were young. First were probably birds that issued forth from their different eggs that hatched in the springtime—just as now, in the summer, cicadas leave their husks and emerge to light and life. The earth must have given birth to all the mortal creatures when there was a great abundance of heat in the fields and moisture, and there, wherever a suitable place could be found, a womb would develop, held in the earth by a delicate network of roots. When the right time had elapsed, the infants were delivered, fleeing the moisture to seek the air, and through the pores the earth would pour forth a liquid not at all unlike milk, just as a woman who gives birth finds that her breasts are filled with milk for her baby, that nourishment that nature has arranged,

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as it contrived as well for these early creatures food, warmth, and soft beds of leaves and grasses to lie on, just as we put our infants in cradles filled with down. But then, in those early days, the earth was neither too hot nor cold, nor were there winds of excessive force, for all grew up at the same time in elegant delicate balance. We see how, over and over, the earth deserves the name that poets give her of “mother,” since as it turns out she gives 740 birth to human beings as well as the beasts and the birds that range over the mountains or fly through the air above us in all their varied forms and habits and ways of surviving. But this hasn’t happened lately, for the earth is like all women and as it aged it has lost the fecundity it had. Time changes the world, and one state of things declines into another. Nothing remains as it was. Nature compels us all to adapt and adjust. One thing grows weak and something new appears, some upstart to take its place. This also describes what happened to the earth itself as it aged 750 and could no longer bring forth new life as it used to do. Along the way there were many curious trials that did not quite work out, or were wonders, or some would call them portents: hermaphrodites, for example, that were equal part women and men; or some who were born without feet or without fingers and hands;

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some did not have mouths; and some were without any eyes. Some had all their limbs, but bound to their trunks and useless. None of these monsters, or call them rather false starts, could grow or feed themselves, or live to reproduce, all of which are required for a species to carry on and survive through the generations with seeds that renew their kind. Some of course could manage to grow and produce young, but nevertheless they perished, lacking either in courage or cunning or speed that would have protected them or helped them feed on the breath of life. There are some beasts that we humans protect and use for our own comfort and profit. The lion has courage, the fox has cunning, the stag has speed, and the dog is smart and able to drowse rather than sleep, and is also good of heart and a friend and faithful companion. There are also the horned oxen, beasts of burden, and sheep with their warm and wooly fleece. These are now in our care having fled from the wild to find among mankind peace and safety, Memmius, which is how we can reward them for the great good they do us. But other kinds did less well, could not survive in the wild and were of no use to us

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and, out there at the mercy of other stronger or faster predators, they dwindled and at last died out altogether. But there are also creatures that never could have existed, Centaurs, for example, that could not have possibly been, as I can demonstrate clearly even to strenuous dimness. 780 The two-fold body couldn’t have worked with the different limbs that were not at all compatible, and with powers that didn’t match. For one thing the horse is at his best at the age of three— an age at which young boys still dream of their mothers’ breasts. Years later, the strong powers of horses fade but that would be exactly the time of flowering youth when the cheeks are showing the first signs of fuzz and the body is coming into its fullness of vigor. So how would this work with the different parts of the creature ill-suited to one another? In the same way, a Scylla, that half-fish with a girdle 790 of snarling dogs, and all other such picturesque monsters with incompatible members are merely poets’ inventions. They could not grow together, or age together, or burn with passion at the same time, or agree in their habits. Goats, for instance, can nibble on hemlock without any problem, but a man who tried to do that would sicken and probably die.

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Think of the Chimera, that lion-cum-serpent-cum-goat that’s supposed to belch forth fire out of its lion mouth. Lions, surely, are fierce but are they fireproof? Now some will maintain that these fabulous creatures existed 800 back when the world was young and all sorts of strangeness prevailed, and they babble on of whatever wonders they can dream up— rivers of gold that flowed over the earth, and trees that blossomed with precious jewels, or giant men who could stride across the deepest oceans and reach up to touch the stars. Let us grant that there were in the early days the seeds of many things that have not survived, but there could not have been these creatures of mixed growth joined together in one. We see around us trees, grains, and various flowers that spring up out of the earth in luxuriant abundance, 810 but they do not intermix. Each thing goes on its own way, to preserve its distinctive self by nature’s laws. Meanwhile, the race of men was vastly different then, hardier and able to forage for food on the hard earth. They had bigger bones, and stronger sinews. Tough, they were more indifferent to heat and cold than we are now, got sick less often, and roved through the forests and savannahs eating whatever they found in the fashion of wild beasts.

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Through many years and aeons, they survived this way with no plows to work the fields to produce a predictable crop, 820 no sickles to prune the branches of those trees that bore fruit, but managing somehow on what the earth, the sun, and the rain could give on their own. And for this those men were grateful, content to gather acorns and the woods’ bright colored berries that grew then in abundance and were larger than they are now. There were probably other foods as well that nature produced, nothing that we would like but nourishing nevertheless. For their thirst, they had the rushing waters of brooks and streams as they poured down from the mountains to refresh both man and beast in the realm of the water-nymphs who preside over their flow. 830 At first they had no idea of the use of fire. It took some time to learn that they could take the skins of beasts and fashion clothing to keep them warm in the wintertime. They lived in woodland thickets or sometimes in caves where they hid to escape from the biting winds and the beating rain and sleet. They lived in a primitive state with no idea of a common good, or of laws and customs, or of care for one another.

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Whatever fortune gave to one, he would drag away and keep it all to himself, and each had to fight against all in an endless struggle for food, water, and minimal comfort. 840 There were no rites of marriage, but brusque woodland encounters, the result sometimes of desire that both man and woman felt, but sometimes the male would take the woman by brute force, or perhaps offer a bribe—acorns, a cluster of berries, or maybe a nice ripe pear for which she would give him a tumble. But imagine their strength and speed, their wonderful powers that let them hunt with stones and clubs the beasts in the woods and forests upon whose flesh they feasted, pursuing some and fleeing others that were stronger and from whom they had to hide. At night, when it got dark, they’d just curl up on the ground 850 or in some pile of leaves, but they did not worry that darkness would never give way or wander around in the dark in distress wondering where the light could have gone. They knew, having learned even by then that the night at last gives way to the day in alternation. Therefore, they slept until sunlight woke them,

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although their sleep was light, alert always for sounds of beasts in the night that might appear to attack and eat them. When a foaming boar showed up or a lion was in the region, they’d run away or try to find some safer refuge. They died, and they lamented, but in different ways than we do, 860 for each of them ran a risk and could at any time be caught and devoured by some predator, red in tooth and claw. And some who escaped alive but bitten and wounded might pray to the underworld to take them and end their pains, entirely unaware how wounds could be treated and even cured. But a single day did not involve a battle with thousands of men in the field slaughtering one another, or the crew of a ship going down, dashed in a storm on the rocks with every hand on it lost. The idea of going to sea had not yet crossed their minds, to be tempted by pleasant days 870 that lure our mariners out and then, on a whim, betray them. They starved to death sometimes, while we nowadays overeat and kill ourselves that way. Sometimes they died from poison, not knowing what plants or mushrooms they ought to avoid,

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but that we know now and sometimes in our despair use them to put an end to displeasing lives, our own or others’. After the passage of time they learned, little by little, the secrets of fire and clothing, and how to construct rude huts into which they moved and invited their women as mates so that the customs of wedlock began in some vague way, and together the man and the woman would bear and rear their offspring, and this, I do believe, was when we began to get soft, for now there was fire to warm our shivering bodies. No longer did we have to endure the rain and cold but could take shelter, and Venus sapped our strength with these pleasant domestic arrangements in which sex was more convenient and therefore much more frequent. Nearby were other huts, which is to say there were neighbors, friendships, and the beginnings of cooperative ventures in hunting and in protecting their women and little children, and in their early stammering words they agreed by voice as well as gesture that it was right to pity the weak and give them help. This sensible rule was not always followed, but most of them must have obeyed it often enough so that we

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were able to survive and increase from one generation down through the next and the next, even to our own time. We can assume that language began in much the same way as we see it develop in children, the different sounds of the tongue coming to stand for the names of objects, at first with gestures, but then without the superfluous pointing of index fingers. The power was always there, and need and occasion arose 900 to elicit its use. We have seen a calf with those velvety bumps on top of its head that it uses to butt another and push in battles, more or less mock. So with the kittens of panthers, lions, and tigers, they know how to scratch with their tiny claws and bite with their needle-like teeth as they later will in earnest hunger in their hunting to bring down their helpless quarry. Young chicks too we see flapping their useless wings that they will learn to use when they have to leave the nest. It therefore makes no sense to attribute the birth of language to one particular human, cleverer than his fellows, 910 who made it all up and taught the others the words for objects.

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It must have been a collective venture, with one and another adding words and then phrases that came into common usage. If one man invented a word, why would the others adopt it? Or do you suppose that the entire system of language was planted in their primitive minds waiting to be discovered in each and used in common? That is just as hard to credit as the notion that one could impose his system on all the others, mastering them all and teaching the names of things that he would make them learn and accept. Teaching is hard enough when students are eager. What are we to imagine as he yells at them over and over these phonemes they’ve never heard and tries to impose them upon an unwilling, unruly classroom? But it isn’t so surprising that man could figure out sounds’ possible meanings. We see in the dumb beasts the beginnings of such expressive noises. The animals’ cries of pain are different from those of fear or pleasure, as we have seen ourselves, for example, in dogs, who growl when they are annoyed

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baring their teeth and making perfectly clear what they mean, but their rage has a different sound when they bark in clamorous challenge. 930 But then look at them playing with a litter of pups and their yelps are clearly those of fondness, snapping but with their teeth never biting hard. Or leave them alone in the house, and you hear them howl, or they whimper if you have occasion to strike them. With horses too you can listen to what verges closely on speech when the mares hear the neigh of a vigorous stallion pricked by the spur of love and he snorts from his flared nostrils and they respond full of desire. At other times his neigh is altogether different, piteous or defiant. The calls of birds are also distinguishable in meaning 940 and the gulls, hawks, and ospreys cry in their swoops and dives into the water for food. The noises they make when they fight are altogether different as they squabble with one another for a tidbit that one has dropped. Rooks and crows, it is said, have learned to alter their raucous cries to summon wind and rain. Thus, if different occasions elicit different sounds from the birds and beasts, then human beings, too, should have been able to work out the start of significant speech.

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You have been very patient, wondering perhaps how we discovered fire, but that’s not so abstruse a question. All we need assume is that lighting came down from the sky to strike a tree somewhere and start a fire as now happens still, and they realized that it was hot. Sometimes it also can happen that wind will cause a tree to sway and rub against another so that the force presses fire out to flash from the branches and trunks. Either way, there was fire, waiting to be discovered, or rather say to be tamed so that it could be put to practical use. And either the fire itself or the heat of the sun instructed these early men and women in the start of the art of cooking, as they saw how things grow mellow out in the sun in the fields. Over time, they learned these first things from which they also figured out how to learn and improve the lives they were leading, and those who were smartest and strongest earned the respect of their fellows. Kings began to establish cities with walls for protection. They allotted cattle and land to each, according to beauty or strength, or genius, for in those days all three were important. Gold was discovered and with it there came the concept of wealth,

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whereupon strength and beauty were robbed of their early honors, for however handsome or strong a person may be, the people 970 are likely to show allegiance and honor to those who are rich. It is nevertheless true that if one leads a proper life guided by reason, the greatest wealth a person can have is contentment with a modest portion. What does one need? Fame? Money? Power? Are these the secure basis for a life of quiet and comfort? The struggle to climb the hill, to attain riches and honors, is hard and full of dangers, and even the summit is insecure for the thunderbolt of somebody else’s envy may strike at any moment to cast one down again, lower than when he began, 980 even into the loathsome depths of Tartarus. Envy, unlike lightning, strikes upward to scorch above. Better, then, to obey in peace than to give commands, holding the world in your power. Let ambition go and its purposeless sweat and worry. What do the rulers know that they have not learned from others? Even their own desires are for what they have heard they should want. This folly, then and now, and in time to come is futile: happiness lies elsewhere. Kings therefore were killed, and the majesty of thrones lay in the dust, with the monarch’s head beneath the feet 990

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of an angry mob. The various honors that they had paid him had turned to fear, and they had then come to begrudge what they had once been happy to give him. Not any more! Order was brought down; confusion reigned; and each sought for himself whatever power he thought he could grab. In that sorry chaos, magistrates were created to referee the struggles and govern by custom and statute, for mankind had wearied of violence and continual civil strife and in their fatigue they accepted the ideas of law and justice to limit if not to end the continual bloody feuding. 1000 The change that then took place was greater than they had expected, for here was born the fear of punishment, the cost of violence greater now that it also involved the notion of guilt. How can one pass a life of comfort and ease worried that his deeds have broken the laws and subject him at any moment to justice of men and the gods as well? He can try to hide his misdeeds from them, but he knows in his own heart what he has done and what therefore should follow. In his dreams, his guilt cries out, as we have sometimes heard, men asleep accusing themselves of heinous offenses 1010 and calling aloud their darkest secrets for all to hear. The next subject that we must address is the growth of religion

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that spread belief in the gods over great nations and filled cities with shrines and altars where elaborate rites are performed that flourish now everywhere and arouse in the hearts of men devotion and awe to prompt them to build even more and flock together at those places on feast days to offer prayers. Back then, in those early days, men would see, when awake but even more when asleep, those of especial strength or great stature or beauty. To these apparitions they gave 1020 credence and they attributed sensation, motion, the power of speech, and believed they embodied various kinds of perfection, along with which—why not?—immortality too, for the visions remained the same whenever they might appear but also because perfection cannot decay or die or be forced to give way to any greater earthly power. And if they were gods, we supposed they had to be happy, and if they had to worry, as we do, that death was always waiting, how could they have that careless confidence we envy? In dreams, men saw them perform miracles, feats of strength, 1030 and do battle with monsters and demons and never lose. They saw, too, the round of seasons and wondered why

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and how these patterns obtained, and the easiest explanation was attributing all these matters to the hands of the mighty whose strength and wisdom were such that merely by a divine nod they could produce results here below, on earth. They placed the gods in the sky because that was where they saw the sun and the moon and the stars revolving in complicated cycles and orbits. Day and night are also up there, and meteors and comets, and clouds float by bringing rain, snow, winds, and lightning, and the frightening thunderclaps, rumbling over the mountains as if in a mighty anger. Ah, unhappy men, to leap to such conclusions, not only to make up gods but to attribute to them this fury! What bitter groans did men then create for themselves, and us, what tears, what terrible wounds did they inflict on the generations that followed! How is it pious and wise to approach with covered head a piece of stone and fall prostrate before it to ask it for favors or for forgiveness? What is the point of splashing the blood of innocent beasts in showers upon these altars? Make promises to it? Swear oaths? Is it not better to live with a tranquil mind,

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surveying whatever one sees with a steady, clear-eyed acceptance? Our lives are hard enough, and full of sufficient woes that we have no need to look up at icily distant stars, imagining powerful gods who have been the cause of our griefs. Are those the mighty powers that order the constellations noticing us, or even arranging our sufferings here for any plausible cause? How can we hold up our heads against such awesome beings? And it leaves us filled with doubts 1060 about the start of the world, or whether it has some limit when the walls of the firmament will give way to the endless strains of restless motions. Will the gods endure forever, and will they for whatever reason preserve this fragile world? Why would they care? Would they perhaps despise not only time but whatever is subject to its vulgar depredations? Whose mind does not shrivel in fear of the gods’ displeasure or even notice? Whose skin does not prickle with terror when the rage of storms is personalized and becomes a sign of intention directed against us? Nations are cowed and mighty kings 1070 cringe and want to crawl under their splendid thrones for protection,

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smitten with fear of the gods. We wonder what was the cause, consider whatever arrogant word we might have uttered, what good deed we left undone, what petty crime we committed to bring on this extravagant show of the deities’ ire. Strong, sensible men, admirals of great fleets, when a wind comes up at sea and the waves roil and tumble look at their mighty armadas, their battle elephants, legions, and all their gleaming weapons, and fall to their knees in prayer, begging the gods’ pardon for whatever it could have been that provoked all this. Calm waters, gentle breezes, their lives, please, but the storm, the hurricane now, continues. The fleet is driven helpless onto the rocky shoals of death. And which is worse? Is catastrophe meaningless? Or is it anger on someone’s part, or disapproval? The proud regalia of office is mocked, the fasces and battle axes, are trampled down in the dust in a show of divine contempt. So too with dreadful earthquakes, when cities are shaken and walls crumble and fall, the sons of men will feel helpless, altogether powerless, and they hate

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themselves for their weakness and therefore suppose that the gods as well must feel that same contempt and that this is what men deserve, for if we don’t have power, it probably lies elsewhere in the wonderful hands of the gods, immortal and wiser than we are. What next? Technology, maybe. Copper, iron, and gold as well as silver and lead must have been discovered when a bolt of lightning started a forest fire somewhere on a mountainside, or maybe a battle took place and men started the blaze, or farmers were simply clearing a field or getting rid of beasts that preyed upon their herds. (They didn’t have fences then or guard dogs for their cattle.) But however the fire started, the heat of the raging flames devoured the trees deep down to the roots and parched the earth so that the veins of metal were exposed and the heat melted the ore that then collected in pools of silver or gold or copper or lead that men could find, pick up, and examine and marvel at for their strange shininess and smoothness. They saw how this stuff was molded into the shape of the pool

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in which it had congealed, each hollow leaving its mark, and it must have occurred to someone that it could be remelted 1110 and poured into any shape, or beaten out with blows to take an edge or hold a point and become a tool to cut down a tree or hew the timber and plane the planks or to bore holes. They tried to do this with silver and gold but they found that bronze was better (that alloy of copper and tin). The bronze turned out to be stronger and held a honed edge longer, for which reason they thought it more valuable than gold and more deserving of honor. Now it’s the other way, and gold, although less useful, is rarer and therefore dearer, which is how things go in the world. What was once esteemed is no longer respected when something new appears or something old 1120 emerges from the contempt that was its former condition to prosper now and receive the praises of all mankind. How iron was discovered, Memmius, you can imagine. The first weapons were hands, the fingernails, the teeth, and stones and maybe pieces of branches broken from trees. Soon thereafter they learned to use fire to fight with, and then they discovered metals: bronze came in and iron. Bronze was what they used first. It’s easier to find

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and also to work, and with it they tilled the soil and did battle for cattle and land. In the earliest days the fighters armed with bronze were able to vanquish those who were not. Later, when iron began to be mined and fashioned into swords and other weapons, bronze became a thing of contempt. When everyone had iron, men could do better at farming and the struggles of war were equal again among the contenders. It was probably also for some advantage in battle that men figured out how to tame horses and even to ride them, holding a rein in the left hand and in the right a weapon. That was probably first, and the two-horse car came later, as the four-horse chariot probably came after that. And later the Carthaginians used their huge hideous beasts, the elephants, to fight with, confounding the hosts of Mars. Gloomy but ingenious, Discord helped us discover one thing after another to terrify mankind as warfare became ever worse among the contesting nations. They probably tried bulls and even wild boars, hoping to send these fierce and dangerous beasts against their foes. Some even tried lions with well-armed trainers attempting

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to lead them on a leash and then direct them onward, but it didn’t work out well. The lions would go berserk, wreaking promiscuous slaughter on friend and foe alike, roaring and shaking their manes, and terrifying the horses that, of course, stampeded and ruined the order of battle the leaders had had in mind. She lions bounded up for the faces of those nearby or pounced on men from behind and tore them apart with their curving claws and relentless jaws. The bulls, no better, tossed their friends up in the air or trampled them underfoot, or gored their guts with their wicked horns, so that even their pawing the earth sent terror in all directions. The boars were likewise useless, goring whoever approached, horsemen and footmen both, and the horses wheeled and swerved or reared to avoid their tusks, pawing the air, but in vain, for they would collapse, and cover the ground with their heavy bodies, which crushed their helpless riders. Tame enough at home, the boars lost it in battle with their blood lust up and their wounds that drove them into a frenzy of indiscriminate carnage,

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and they could not be recalled but roved the field still fighting. Most of the wild beasts behaved in this way, including those pachyderms that Carthage tried to use. When hurt they, too, would run amok, inflicting harm on their friends. I have no idea whether to believe in those wild stories, and one would suppose that cautious men would take good care before trying out such hare-brained ideas, but someone somewhere could have made such attempts, here or in some other world in the limitless universe. Perhaps the idea was not so much to conquer as to alarm the arrayed foe and cause them to turn and run in their not unjustified terror. Or they could have hoped for a draw, a suicide mission call it, where they would die but take a superior force with them. Plaited clothing came before woven cloth, for weaving requires iron to fashion various parts of the loom— the treadles and spindles, the shuttles, and the clattering leash-rods. Men probably learned to weave before women did, because men in a general way are more skillful than women. But the hardy farmers insulted the weavers and made jokes

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at their expense, so they left the work to their womenfolk, and the men would go outside to do the rougher labor that required greater strength and endurance of bodies and hands. The arts of sowing and grafting first came from nature herself, the maker of all things, and men saw that berries and acorns falling down to the ground would sprout and produce new seedlings underfoot. And someone thought of the notion of putting these shoots in established branches of already grown trees or to plant the slips directly into prepared ground. One after another, hit or miss, they tried new ways of cultivating their little plots. They saw wild fruits grow tame, and they learned the various arts of tillage, and slowly but surely the forests retreated from flat land and up the mountainsides as the cultivation continued. They constructed irrigation ditches and holding ponds, and they invented viticulture with grapes in their long rows, with the gray-green olive trees demarking their boundary lines. After enough time had passed, the landscape resembled more and more what we see now out in the countryside, with entire vistas divided into various farmers’ fields,

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some in grains and some in orchards of fruit trees. Somebody probably tried to whistle in imitation of the songs that he heard the different kinds of birds sing out to greet the morning. And later someone somewhere else heard how the wind could sound in a hollow reed and played with the reed, himself, to try to reproduce the effect, and in this way the pipes were born, or the flutes that are cut with holes that they made from hemlock stalks. These people invented music, and shepherds out in the glades refined and improved the art in the time they had as they watched their flocks grazing the grass. In such ways, luck combined with intelligence to bring these novelties into the light by which our lives are graced. These melodies calmed their minds, and as they ate their fill and listened to the music, they began, perhaps for the first time, at least to imagine what happiness might be like. Stretched out on the grass by a stream of running water, beneath the branches of some towering tree, with the weather gentle and pleasant, how could they not find delight

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with the blossoms of flowers about them? Chatting together, laughing, they knew the modest but real delights that their simple world offered them as a gift. They wove garlands of flowers with which to bedeck one another, and laughed again, and the rustic muse prompted them all to get up and tromp on their mother earth with an awkward dancing, which provoked fresh peals of amusement. These may have been simple diversions but they were novel, and therefore all the more vivid. And at night, alone, unable to sleep, they also discovered the soothing pleasure of music, the way to entertain themselves with the reed pan-pipe in different modes and rhythms, as watchmen do even now, who perform their innocent art for themselves in idle moments and recreate the early woodland people’s delight. That seems to be how things work, that whatever gives us pleasure, unless we can remember something before that was better, occupies our minds and holds it in vogue until something new comes along to prompt us to change our tastes.

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Men got tired of eating acorns and sleeping on beds of piled up leaves, and wearing the pelts of the beasts they had killed. Even so, the first of those who thus clad themselves would, I suppose, have aroused the envy of others and even attacks in which, in the mayhem, the cloak was torn into shreds. It was rude skins then, and now it is togas of gold and purple that torment the lives of those who wear them and those who don’t. And we deserve the greater blame, for back in those early days the alternative was freezing. Now, it’s a simple cape, cheap but perfectly able to keep us warm and dry 1250 of which we can make use for protection against the weather. For the costly and showy trifles, men wear themselves out, working too hard and believing that if only they could possess that wonderful thing—whatever it is—they would be content, not knowing that contentment always comes from within. But, no, we look about us, and cupidity burns in our bosoms, and we venture forth to the dangerous seas where the billows of war

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arise from the ever-churning depths in which we drown. Take solace, rather, from watching the rounds of the sun and the moon and their stately procession that cannot be interfered with and teaches that the seasons come round in order and everything has a plan. Men were already living in fortified towns, and the fields outside the walls were divided up into plots and worked by farmers, ships under sail were plying the sea, and men had made compacts among themselves and there were treaties among the towns, when poets began to sing of heroic deeds. The art of reading and writing had just been invented, and for that reason the earlier history of mankind is a mystery to us, except for what, by reason, we can reconstruct, extrapolating from what we know now to imagine what probably happened then, as slowly men progressed, and ships, fortifications, laws, armor, clothing, and all of life’s great prizes came into being along with its luxuries—poetry, painting, artful sculptures in bronze or stone, as men groped forward

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a step at a time by the trial and error of active minds. In this way, over time, all these things were born as reason raised us up into the precincts of light and we learned as we went along to maintain with persistent effort the dizzying heights upon which we now find ourselves perched.

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It was Athens, that glorious city, that first spread among men the seeds of the cultivated life, enacting laws that showed us the way to a new degree of civility. Also she offered us solace when she gave us that great mind who poured forth his deep wisdom from his truth-telling lips. Even after his death, Epicurus’s fame endures not only at home but abroad and his glory reaches the skies. He was the one who saw that the world provides all things that men really need for their lives and demonstrated that safety could be established. He taught us how wealth, power, and honors, 10 fame, and one’s children’s success do not assuage the heart’s anguish or give one comfort or freedom from complaint and lamentation. The flaw, he saw, was not in the dinner 251

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but in the pot itself, which embittered whatever it touched and corrupted whatever dainties might be placed within it. Even blessings soured, in part because the vessel was leaking and riddled with holes so that it could never be filled, and in part because of its taint that gave a bitter flavor to whatever one put in it. Therefore, with his discourse he purged the heart and set a limit to its desires 20 and also to its fears, and showed us the highest good toward which we should all strive. He showed us, too, the narrow path we ought to follow in a thoughtful, unswerving course. He pointed out what evils there are in men’s affairs assailing on every side in various forms, by chance or by nature’s laws, and he also taught us how to confront each ill as it approaches the gates with its new threat and how, most of the time, it is better not to fight but acknowledge superior force and thus free the heart from care. Children tremble with terror at what might hide in the dark, 30 but we feel fears in the light that are of no greater menace than those nursery monsters which are not at all the problem but rather the fear itself. Daylight will not relieve us, but the contemplation of nature’s organized system of laws— and therefore I pick up again the thread of my discourse. I have shown how the various parts of the firmament are mortal

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and that even heaven has a substance that had a birth. I have spoken some of what goes on there, but still have more to explain. I will climb back into the Muses’ car to attempt to give a description of how the winds arise and then subside, when their fury has been somehow abated. I will address the other phenomena of the sky that terrify mankind and arouse in their delicate spirits fear of the mighty gods that their ignorance compels them to credit or blame for these events and attribute kingship, unable as they are to imagine a lesser cause than the exercise of divine power. But if our teachings are anywhere near correct about the nature of gods whose lives are without care, the connection is hard to make between these earthly transactions and those beings overhead, dwelling somewhere in tranquil ethereal regions. But people tend to revert under stress to their earlier superstitions and imagine cruel taskmasters, omnipotent beings we wretches ought to fear and appease, even though clear logic sets forth those things that can be and those that cannot and shows us the boundaries of the different domains that not even gods are able to cross. But faulty thinking leads men astray. What you have to do is spew out all those absurd ideas and get them far behind you, unworthy as they are of the gods whom they unwittingly insult in a description

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that fails to account for the lofty peace of divine beings. It is not that the gods will care or punish you for your thoughts, but you will take upon yourself that job of correction tormenting yourself and telling yourself that you act for them, feeling terrible guilt every time you approach a shrine, and depriving yourself of the tranquil vision the gods offer of the beauty that they embody and that men’s minds should treasure. The kind of unhappy life that follows from these errors is easy enough to see whenever we look around us. I have gone on for some time attempting to establish the true wisdom that would prevent such torments in men’s hearts, and much remains to be said in this clearly important purpose. My intention here is to frame it in polished hexameter verses so that these sound ideas may be palatable to the reader. The sky and its changing aspects have to be comprehended, and the causes of thunder and lightning, their motions and their effects, have to be carefully sung. What this work will achieve if I perform it well, will be that men will no longer divide up the sky into quadrants the way the Etruscans did, and then look up and watch for meteors and tremble at whether they crossed from left to right or the other way. How does lightning penetrate walls? How does it escape? Are these the signs of divine power or are they nature

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doing what nature does? I invoke Calliope’s aid, history’s muse, as I run the last lap of this race with the course marked out before me, hoping I may win the crown as well as the praise that comes from pleasing men and also the high gods by doing the truth honor. To begin with, thunder happens when the clouds in the sky crash together, having been driven by different powerful winds. 90 From serene, cloudless parts of the sky there is never thunder, which is how we can be sure that clouds must play their part, and the denser and darker the clouds, the more frequent the thunder. We can assume that clouds are composed of something less dense than wood or stone, and of something more dense than mist or puffs of wispy smoke, for in the former case they could not float in the air but would drop—like stones or pieces of wood. And in the latter, they could not hold snow, sleet, or hail. The noise they make is loud, but then there are loud noises that arise from what we might think of as minor occasions. Consider 100 the snap of a canvas awning stretched out over a theater and how, when the wind takes it and flaps it between its poles, it makes a terrific sound and may even tear apart.

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Or think of laundry out on a clothesline when a brisk wind arises to play with it and produce extremely loud cracking sounds. There are also occasions when paper can make a minuscule thunderclap. What we have to assume is that sometimes the clouds meet head on, but sometimes they scrape their edges as they pass, which is what produces those long continuing peals of thunder, a long, dry, grating sound 110 that assaults the ear until the two clouds have passed each other. Another possible explanation of those extended rolls of thunder might be that a wind is somehow trapped in the interior of some cloud, and it tries to escape confinement, and what we hear is that heavy thunderclap that suggests that the walls of the firmament are threatened and may collapse. What is going on in the sky is that wind, whirling and turning in every direction trying to find some possible egress and the cloud becomes a hollow surrounded by a thick crust. One can imagine what happens when that gives way 120 to the pressure that the wind has been exerting within it, and what we hear on earth is the sound of that violent rupture, a horrifying report that is not, after all, so surprising if you think of what happens here when a bladder of air is burst. Another way in which the clouds can make noise is that air

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blowing through them produces sound, as the branches here can seem to moan when the wind tousles them into protest, for you can look up and see that the clouds too can appear to have that ragged form, resembling trees that rustle their leaves and creak with their branches when a brisk wind from the north 130 arises to whistle through the forest in which they stand. It is also likely that wind up there will tear a cloud in pieces if it hits with sufficient force at the right angle, for we have seen down here, where the winds are less powerful, the demonstrations of the force they bring to bear as they blow over sturdy trees and tear them out by their roots. And clouds, I believe, have waves that also make a noise of the kind that water makes in rushing rivers or rolling tides of the great sea as they break on the rocks on shore. Thunder can also occur when the burning force of lightning 140 falls from one cloud to another. If the second is filled with water when the bolt of lightning hits, then the noise comes from the water that is all at once destroyed, as here, when a piece of iron white hot from the furnace, thrust into water, will sizzle. Of, if the cloud is dry, then its substance is kindled and it burns with a loud noise as we hear sometimes in the mountains

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when a fire rages, driven by winds, and the laurel cracks and burns in the conflagration. And you know there is nothing worse than the sound the mighty Apollo’s laurel makes when it burns. And lastly, the cracking of ice and the sound of hail can resound 150 to make noise in the clouds when the winds smash them together and those great mountains of hail-filled cloud collide in the air. Lightning happens when clouds collide and their seeds of fire are stricken out in much the same way as sparks are produced when flint is struck against iron and they leap forth to start a fire. But the reason why we hear the thunder after we see the lightning is that sounds take longer to reach the ear than images can travel. We have sometimes found this when at a great distance we have watched someone cutting a large tree with a double-headed axe, and we see 160 the blow of the axe against the wood a moment before we hear the dull thud that it made at the time it happened. In just the same way we see the flash of the lightning before we hear the noise that it made in that very same collision. This is how it can happen that the sky flashes with light and then some brief time later the rumble comes in its train.

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That wind that I described before that enters a cloud and gets itself caught inside probably heats it up which is what kindles the fire. Sometimes a leaden missile hurled through the air will melt when it travels a long distance through the atoms of air. When the wind in that black cloud has burst it by violent pressure and heated whatever it touched, it squeezes out the seeds of fire that cause the flashes, and then the sound, which is slower, follows along behind them, striking our ears later than the fire reached our eyes. The other adjustment you must make when you look up at clouds is that they may appear to be scattered with spaces between them, and yet they are piled higher than any of us can imagine and surely higher than we are able to see from below. Sometimes when we observe them move through the air or piled high over the crest of a mountain range we can glimpse something of their formation and how it extends on up, one on top of another and pressing down below, or sometimes lying still while the winds are whirling around them. Then, we can get some idea of their huge masses, caverns with turrets and vaulted roofs in which the wind can get caught and, like a captured beast in a cage, hate its confinement

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and struggle to find a way out, attempting this way and that, and, growling in its frustration, collect the seeds of fire from the clouds themselves that they fling into the hollow furnace 190 the crust of the cloud has made and it shatters and lightning flashes. Another reason that golden fire flies down to the earth is that the clouds must have many seeds of fire within them and when they are free from wetness, their color shines all the brighter. Indeed, we may suppose that they receive many seeds from the bright light of the sun, and it only stands to reason that they should be bright and abundantly pour forth their hot fires. Thus, when the wind has crushed them together and squeezed them into a confined space, they erupt and pour forth their dazzling light. Lightning can also strike when the clouds above us are thin, 200 for then, as the wind disperses them, they let drop those seeds of fire, and the lightning flashes and thunder rumbles its frightening noise. We can tell a fair amount about the thunderbolts’ nature by the marks they leave on trees they have struck and the nasty odor of sulphur that hangs for a good long while in the tainted air.

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These are the signs of fire rather than wind and rain, which do not set roofs ablaze or even entire buildings. So what this is is fire, of the most refined kind, its composition being of elements so extremely small that nothing whatever can block their way. And this 210 is how the lightning can pass through the wall of a house as sounds and voices can also do. It passes through stone and bronze and can melt the bronze or even gold it touches. And wine evaporates on the instant, but the vessel remains unharmed, the heat relaxing the earthenware and making its substance porous so that the fire passes through to the atoms of wine to dissolve and disperse them, as even the sun cannot over the course of time, as powerful as that is. We can infer from this how much stronger a force is lightning. The question, of course, arises as to how these thunderbolts 220 are produced and what it is that gives them the power to split tall towers, houses with beams and rafters, to demolish the monuments of men and kill not only humans but animals too. What force they have and how and whence it comes about I will now try to explain, no longer delaying with promises you may have started by now to doubt. We have to believe that they come from the clouds, piled thick and high, for they never appear from a cloudless sky of serene blue,

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nor indeed when the cover of clouds in the heavens is lightly packed. This we can tell is true from what we experience, day 230 to day. We know that in thunderstorms the sky is packed on every side as if the darkness of Acheron had come to invade our world and fill the sky’s large spaces. It is not so far-fetched a figure for the dark terror that hangs over us all when the storm gathers and we await it here below, helpless, and knowing what impends. When it happens out at sea, it is even in some ways more terrifying, as if a flood of pitch had been poured down from a limitless sky to cover the water with blackness, and the tempest approaches swiftly, and with its winds comes fire 240 dancing in demoniac glee over the waves, while on shore men look out in terror and scurry to safety. We therefore must suppose that the clouds are piled on high for unless they were many and thick, the darkness would not be nearly so great as we sometimes see it, and there could not be so much rain as to overwhelm us down here and make the level of rivers rise above their banks that otherwise contain them. It must take a very great many clouds to flood the plains as we have ourselves seen happen every so often. And when those mighty storms arise, the sky is filled 250 with fires and winds and the rumble is everywhere and the lightning

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flashes here and there in spasm after spasm, and as I have suggested above, the hollow clouds must contain and enclose these seeds of heat that they have received from the sun. Thus, when the wind collects them into a small space and presses out many seeds of heat and mingles itself with fire, the whirlwind inside this overheated furnace sharpens the thunderbolts, while at the same time the fire increases the heat of the wind, which is anyway hot from its speed. Then when the temperature has reached a certain point, 260 the thunderbolt is ripe and it bursts from the cloud and flies, flashing down here and there, with the loud crash that follows so that the sky above seems likely to overwhelm us. The rumbles roll through the sky and assail the earth below and the violent storm itself seems shocked as it pours down its unrelenting deluge, as the clouds overhead in their siege send down their wind and rain that they punctuate with fire. It can also sometimes happen that a cloud, pregnant with lightning fully formed in its belly is struck by a wind and the blow bursts the cloud so that the thunderbolt is discharged 270 in whatever direction the assault of the wind dictates. Sometimes even without a cloud, the wind in its long journey through space encounters some body too large to pass through,

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and, as it scrapes along, it acquires from the air those minuscule bodies that then commingle within it, producing fire during its flight—just as a leaden projectile grows hot as it flies through the air, casting off seeds of coldness and acquiring those of heat at it goes along in its course. Another possible way in which these things can happen is that the blow of one thing against another produces 280 heat, so that the wind and what it strikes both grow hot from the encounter, as flint and iron will send out seeds of hot fire, even though the stone and the iron are both cold. Still the seeds of fire are there within their bodies. So with the winds that strike the clouds in the air. And the wind itself, meanwhile, cannot be altogether cold, because of the heat of its motion, so that it has within it some warmth when it hits the cloud. The speed and the heavy blow of the thunderbolt come about because there is such compression within the clouds and that force 290 increases as the energy gets stored up in the manner of a catapult that is able to fling the heaviest missiles at a wonderful speed when the mechanism releases the tension. Something like that must happen when the cloud can no longer retain the thunderbolt and it shoots with all that stored-up force.

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It also stands to reason that the atoms that make up lightning must be small and smooth, so that nothing can get in their way, and that is why it can manage to penetrate through narrow passages in walls. Almost nothing can stop it as it flies along at that great speed we have all observed. Anyway, a thing with weight tends to fall in a downward direction, and when that thing is hurled down it travels twice as fast, so that it rushes earthward almost instantaneously. And added to this its speed is accelerating as it falls, so it goes even faster as it comes from a great height to hurtle into the ground. It is not out of the question that it may draw from the air certain bodies it uses to fuel itself and travel even faster still. And what it passes through it does not hurt, nor is it in any way impeded, for fire, being fluid, can pass through tiny pores, but when it hits on the ground its particles join together and it can dissolve bronze or melt gold in a moment. Its mass is composed of bodies that are small and very smooth and they make their way into the metal and sever the bonds and untie all the knots of its component bodies. The likeliest seasons in which thunderstorms will happen are the fall, when the shining stars are thick and bright in the sky,

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and the springtime, when the flowers come into leaf and blossom. In the cold of winter the fires are not so hot and in summer 320 when in the heat the winds are lacking in strength, the clouds are not so dense in their substance. But when the sky is between the extremes of heat and cold, the causes of thunderstorms are likelier to combine. Or rather say that in spring and fall the heat and cold struggle with one another, and there is a general discord up in the sky with the different elements in the battle and a tumult of fires and winds. What has more warmth obviously has less cold, and unlike things combat one another and make for a great confusion. Similarly in autumn, when conditions are reversed 330 and the cold increases and heat decreases, the fight is renewed and these are the choppy seasons, which is why the thunderbolts are likely to be stirred up by the turbulence that surrounds them, water on one side, wind on the other, and flames commingled in a well-matched contest the pattern of which we can understand. This is what thunder and lighting are all about, not the charts the Etruscans keep to discern the purposes of the gods,

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or record where lightning has hit and where it has caused pollution, or calculate which quarter has been involved, or note what walls it has entered and where it has exited and the omens 340 it signifies of heaven’s intentions. This is absurd! If Jupiter’s will were involved in every strike of lightning, the fire and the thunder, and all that impressive show, why do evil men walk on the earth in safety, having committed truly terribly crimes? No lightning strikes their wretched bodies! No sulphurous flames engulf them as a punishment for them and a lesson to mankind. If a god is involved, what sense does it make for innocent people suddenly to be caught up in terrible tornadoes or hit by heavenly fire that they have by no means deserved? 350 And why does he waste his labor throwing bolts to the deserts or mountaintops where nobody lives and no crimes could have been committed? Is this merely divine marksmanship practice? Why at any rate would he waste these fireworks rather than put them to good and moral purpose, I ask you? And when the skies are clear, does that mean that no one has sinned, for lightning does not strike out of the clear blue sky beneath which human behavior is pretty much the same as it is when the weather is cloudy? Or does he keep a book and wait for cloudy weather to deliver his chastisements? 360

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And why would lightning strike far out at sea? Is he irked at the waves’ unruly behavior? Do currents and tides annoy him? And as a strategic question, one cannot help but wonder whether he wants us to know where the lightning will come from, as claps of thunder reach us from that quarter where the storm is raging. The sky grows dark and the rumbles command our attention— so we can flee to safety? What is the purpose in that? Furthermore, what meaning can there be in multiple flashes of lightning here and there, dancing all over the sky? And finally—this is the real stumper, if I may say so— 370 why would the god strike at an elegant marble statue of one of his own and do it a terrible hurt? Why would he strike his own temples? Why would he decide to punish the tops of mountains and other high places with fire? Let us now turn our attention to other manifestations of nature’s power, as those waterspouts that the Greeks call “presteres,” but we have seen them ourselves when a column comes down from the sky to touch the waters and stir them up by the blast of the winds to a frenzy that imperils any ship that happens to find itself anywhere nearby and is tossed 380 in the irresistible tumult. This comes about when the wind

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is unable to burst through the cloud and in its force makes it descend little by little from out of the sky to the sea’s surface as though some enormous fist were pressing the cloud downward. Then when the wind at last tears it apart and bursts it produces this awesome waterspout and the waves rise up almost as if they were boiling, for the whirlwind is spinning around and bringing along with it the yielding body of cloud that formerly had contained it. But when it touches the water the wind plunges itself directly into the water 390 so that its full force is vented upon the sea with an almost unbelievable noise and surge of the waves. Sometimes it can happen that the wind wraps itself up inside the clouds, scraping together out of the air the elemental seeds of the cloud, so that when it descends it imitates the “prester,’ and it vomits forth a huge whirlwind and violent storm. This seldom happens on land, so one must assume that the mountains somehow get in the way, but out in the open sea there are no such large obstructions, and the endless empty space is liable to these disasters. 400 Clouds occur when the sky is full of flying bodies that agglomerate because they are rough and thus can entangle with one another and hold together. Early on, these are little clouds, but they grow and cluster together,

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combining to make much larger clouds that the wind carries this way and that, until the time of a storm arrives. The mountaintops, being nearer to heaven, often have clouds collecting around their peaks and smoking with dusky dust. You can sometimes watch them form, the innocuous wisps that collect as the winds drive them about until they acquire greater 410 mass and begin to loom as a mountain over the mountain up into the ether. Up on those peaks, it’s windy and this is what the clouds require to come into being. We know that many bodies arise from the sea, as when we hang clothes on a line and find that they have absorbed the sticky moisture that must have gathered upward and floated through the air from the bay nearby to get caught in the cloth’s fibers. In just that way these bodies float upward to join the clouds, the moisture from down below joining with that above. We have seen mist rising from rivers and swamps and even 420 from the ground itself, exhaled like a monstrous damp breath to suffuse the sky and supply the clouds that are floating across it as, little by little, they grow and join one to another. There, the heat of the ether presses on them from above and packs them together to weave a texture of dark in the blue.

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But it also happens that clouds and thunderheads can appear in our sky having come from somewhere else, the world being full, as I have shown, I think, of innumerable objects. These things can simply appear at enormous speed, as sometimes we see for ourselves when a clear sky becomes dark very quickly 430 and what was only a few moments ago clear blue is covered, the land and sea as well, with a dark blanket that has gathered from all quarters through passages in the ether. These are the results of the motions of elemental bodies, their constant coming in and going away. The next topic is rain and how it comes about that the moisture gathers together in the clouds up there and falls downward upon the earth. We have already discussed the way that the seeds of water can rise up to the clouds from all kinds of places on earth, and I assume that you follow, 440 understand, and concede what I have described. The clouds and the water within them grow much in the same way as our bodies do with the blood and sweat and whatever other moistures that are in them. The clouds get much of their water from the great store of the sea over which they float like great fleecy sponges that the winds carry above it.

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And also from the rivers and other such sources, seeds of water arise to gather in clouds overhead and increase until they are filled up and need to discharge this burden, which they do in one of two ways. Either the winds drive them, 450 pushing down on their mass and pressing them so that showers flow out and fall, or else the winds can fray them thin so that they are loosened and, struck by the sun’s hot rays, melt and drip as wax would over a crackling fire, and from these kinds of events we get showers and drizzles below. The second way that rain can happen is in downpours when the clouds are pressed both by their own weight as well as by the force of the rushing winds. Such rainstorms are heavy and can last for a long time, when the seeds of water are stirred and the huge racks of clouds follow one on another 460 blotting out the sky, and a deluge comes down while more water is also rising and the earth and the air are sodden. Sometimes it will happen at the end of such a storm that the sun’s rays from another part of the sky will shine through the seeds of water, and then, through the black clouds, we can see the rainbow form that this combination is able to make. The other things that can grow in the sky and collect in clouds

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are snow, winds, hail, cold frosts, and ice that hardens water and holds back rivers. But these are easy enough to understand if you simply look with the mind’s keen eye 470 and consider the qualities each of these elements possesses. What next? Earthquakes. How and why do they happen? Let us suppose that the earth below us is everywhere filled with empty caverns, with winds and lakes and pools deep in her bosom, with rocks and steep cliffs all around them, and in these caverns are streams with violent currents that roll huge boulders along in their waves, just as we see here on the earth’s surface, for what we assume is that earth is everywhere the same, no matter where you go. Therefore, there must be below what we see up here, 480 and when there is some great collapse down there, the shock is what we feel on the surface, as the tremblings radiate outward, just as, when wagons of no especially huge loads pass by on a road and their iron rims bounce on the stones and jostle their axles, the buildings on either side will tremble. It also can happen below in those caverns that some great mass is loosened and falls into a pool of standing water the wave that results will produce tremors above on the surface in the way that a vessel holding liquid in it will sway

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as long as that liquid sloshes this way and that inside it. 490 Another reason for earthquakes is that winds inside the earth can gather in some hollow place and thrust themselves forward in one direction or other in those lofty caverns to make the entire earth lean over from the force within it. Buildings above the surface also lean in that direction pushing, of course, downward, so that the beams are dragged out of plumb and their weight adds to the mounting pressure. People understand this, but fear to accept the truth that sooner or later destruction and ruin will come upon them, even though they have seen these phenomena before. 500 If those inner winds never abated the world would surely rush pell-mell to destruction and nothing at all could save it. As it is, they are sometimes strong and then sometimes they are not, or they cease altogether, and here on the surface, although we are threatened often, we mostly escape, for it leans but then rights itself to recover its proper alignment and balance. Buildings totter more at the top than they do at the middle, and more at the middle than at the foundation, which moves only a little bit. It can also happen that wind, either from outside or else arising from within the earth itself can fill 510 those hollow places below and then in a great tumult

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with dismal growling find some way for a sudden escape, cleaving the earth as it does so and making a great chasm. This is what happened at Sidon and, down in the Peloponnese, at Aegium, when an exhalation of air overthrew those cities in the earthquake that followed upon that event. Other cities have fared the same, their walls collapsing, or even sometimes tumbling down into the sea, and not only the buildings but also the people living there. Even if there is not this abrupt explosion of air, 520 it can happen that the force of these winds can work its way through the interstices of earth to produce a series of tremors not unlike the rigors we have when we fall ill and the earth’s surface trembles as we do with a chill. Men shiver then with fear for what can happen above them, should their houses collapse, as well as below where the earth from its deep caverns can manifest these terrible, ruinous tremors that will undo all the bonds of order in what we assumed were our secure lives, transformed in a single moment when those gaping jaws opened to swallow them up in disaster. 530 Let anyone who is able to do so believe that the earth and sky will always be here, given in trust to last forever, even though they know that at any moment the ground under their feet can give way and a pit can open into which all things will fall to an utter and final ruin.

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Have you ever wondered how it is that with all the rivers pouring into the sea, the sea does not overflow or at least increase in its volume? And it often rains on the sea, which adds water there just as it does here on the land. There are also springs and fountains down at the sea bottom 540 that feed it all the time but it never seems to increase. The heat of the sun draws off a great amount, as we see when the wet clothes on a line get dry in a matter of hours. That may not seem like much, but the sea’s expanses are wide, and at every location there, small amounts are drawn off which in the aggregate are very great indeed, and the amount that evaporates must be quite substantial. There are also winds, of course, that take away much moisture sweeping back and forth along the water’s surface. We have often seen how roads that are quite covered in water 550 will dry overnight, and even the mud will crust and harden, and this is the work of wind without the help of the sun. It is also true that the clouds themselves lift a great amount of water out of the sea, which they then store up and pour after the wind has moved them over the land’s surface. And lastly, inasmuch as the earth has a porous body and the land and sea are joined together, we may assume that, as the flow of water comes from land to sea, so there are also ways that it oozes from the salt water back to the land to return to the sources of various rivers, 560

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having been somehow filtered so that it now is sweet. We turn now to the interesting subject of volcanoes and how Mt. Aetna can breathe out fire with such a fury that all Sicily trembles and the rest of the world looks on with a fascinated horror, as they recount how the heavens were filled with black smoke that nonetheless sparkled with flame and struck every heart with panic, not only at what they saw but at what they might next expect, even universal disaster. As we consider this question, you must allow your mind to range widely over all the distant quarters 570 of the universe and remember how great is the sum of things. The sky under which we live looks large to us, but compared with the rest of the universe, it is only a little piece— perhaps even as small a part of the whole as a man is a tiny part of the earth. If you can keep your mind focused on that hugeness and understanding it clearly, then even these spectacular shows of violent fire recede to their proper proportion in the greater scheme of things. To start with something small and comprehensible, think how when somebody has a fever, his limbs are hot 580 and his body is tormented. A foot can swell up, or a tooth cause dreadful distress, or the eyes can burn, or the skin can feel as though it’s on fire with erysipelas creeping over the limbs and even the face, in reaction to what the seeds of the illness that come from the earth and the air and the sky

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can do to a person. Now think on a larger scale and imagine how these seeds of illness can come from the great supply of all things in the world, from the small to the very large, so that the earth itself can quake in a fit of disease and that there are whirlwinds scouring land and sea: 590 Aetna’s fires erupt then in a blaze that reaches the heavens and even the sky is burning, although by chance there is rain, coming down in torrents, but it cannot extinguish the fire. You answer that this eruption is too great for such an account, and it cannot be so simple, but a man who has never seen a mighty river rolling down toward its mouth and the sea would surely find it a marvel beyond belief, although we know that such rivers exist and even take them for granted. And even the mightiest rivers and the oceans themselves are nothing compared to what lies beyond in the universe’s vastness. 600 Still, the question remains to be answered: how the flames are excited that breathe out of Aetna’s mighty furnace. First, the mountain is hollow beneath, with caverns the rock supports, and in those caverns are winds and air—for wind is produced when air is agitated. And it grows hot and heats the surrounding rocks and whatever else it touches, including the earth itself. When it has reached a sufficient temperature, the flames are ignited and these rush up and out through the mountain’s throat to gush high in the air

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scattering smoke and ash far and wide as it spews 610 enormous rocks into the sky, from which we infer the force of that hot wind escaping from those depths. That the mountain is next to the sea is not unimportant. The waves break at its foot and no doubt penetrate through caverns into the heart of the mountain where they mix in with the fire to produce that turbulent power that forces up rocks and sand and ash to what the natives there have called the “crater,” the Greek word for bowl, which is what the formation resembles. We would probably call it the throat or perhaps the mouth. There are surely a number of things one could point to as causes, 620 and perhaps they all work together, or maybe it’s only one that truly is the reason for the way that these things happen. It’s as if you are walking along on the road and you discover a lifeless body. You wonder what it was that killed him. Was he stabbed? Did he freeze to death? Poison? Some sudden disease? What we know for sure is that something must have occurred. The Nile is the only river that every year in the summer overflows its banks to irrigate the adjacent fields. How this can happen is an interesting question. It may be that the etesian winds that blow from the north 630 every year confront the northern flow of the river holding it back and causing the water to rise above

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the low banks that during the rest of the year contain it. The wind comes from the icy north where it’s cold and it meets the waters that come from the south where the heat is very great and the black tribesmen live who are baked by the sun’s rays. It could also be the case that the vast amount of sand that the river has carried seaward collects and is stirred by those winds that roll the sand upstream to block the river’s mouth so that the water’s passage through that mouth is obstructed. 640 Another possible explanation is that those winds drive the clouds to the south so that during that season more rain falls in those mountains where the clouds have been collecting than the river can drain away, and therefore the flooding happens. Or it could be that in the summer, when the sun is hot in the mountains the snowcap melts and the water comes rushing down to flood the river every year as the farmers have learned to expect. Now I shall speak of those various places we call by the name “Avernian,” meaning that they are a danger to flying birds because, when they pass overhead, their beating wings lose strength 650 and they fall down to the ground headlong, utterly helpless,

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or plummet into the water, for often these are lakes such as the one near Cumae, where the hot springs give off mephitic gases rank with sulphur and emit a toxic smoke. There’s another place like this within the walls of Athens on the top of the citadel near the famous temple, the Parthenon of Athena, where hoarse crows never come, not even when the smoke of offerings arises from the sacrificial altars. The crows avoid this place not because of the story the poets tell of the goddess’s 660 anger with the birds for bringing the news of Cecrops’s disobeying her orders. It is rather the place itself that the birds have learned to shun. Syria, too, has a place that is deadly not only to birds but even to beasts that approach, and they stagger and fall as if they had been offered up in that location in sacrifice to infernal gods. The point is that these things have natural explanations, and we ought not to believe that these regions with their lethal exhalations of gases are gates to the world of the dead or that the underworld gods draw souls down from these places 670 in the way that deer are said to be able to draw insects out of their holes somehow by the breath of their flared nostrils. The stories are picturesque, but have nothing to do with the simple truth, which is what I am trying to understand and convey. The view I take and have been proposing all along

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is that here on the earth are elements of many kinds of things. Some of these are useful—we require food, for instance— but others are harmful and cause disease or are even deadly. I have discussed how certain things are better suited to various animals needing them to live their lives. 680 There are like and unlike natures and interweavings of structures, and a range of shapes. Some pernicious elements sneak into the ears or enter the nostrils, and these are rough to the touch. Some things exist that we recoil from touching and hate the taste of, and these can function as warning signals. We all know there are many things that are perfectly loathsome and dangerous. Certain trees have a shade that produces headaches if one has lain down beneath them and stretched out on the duff. There is also on Mount Helicon a tree of which the blossom has a terrible stench that can kill anyone who comes near it. 690 How do these things exist? They draw certain things from the soil that the earth has on offer, mixed up in various ways, and these are some of the strange effects of their combinations. It is said that when the smell of a wick that has just been extinguished reaches the nostrils, it can produce epileptic fits

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so that men foam at the mouth and fall down on the ground. The scent of castor can put a woman to sleep: she will drop her needlework from her hands and just pass out, and this happens if the odor comes to assail her during her period. Other things can loosen the limbs, and shake the body’s spirit. 700 Sometimes this will occur after a large meal or to one who dawdles too long in a bath that is too hot, so that he may even collapse and drown in the tub. The smell of burning charcoal can have adverse effects unless one has taken precautions and drunk a good deal of water. During a fever, the odor of wine can be an unbearable blow. Lots of nasty things are beneath the earth— foul-smelling sulphur, and clumps of asphalt, which aren’t pleasant to sniff. Those who mine for gold and silver and delve in the depths come back to the surface and tell hair-raising stories 710 about the smells in Scaptensula and other such mining towns. And look at those men. It’s pathetic, even for slaves! Their skin is a ghastly color from whatever they’ve been exposed to. They sicken very quickly at that kind of work, and they lose their strength and die, and there have to be many frequent replacements. In short, it is hardly surprising that all these terrible things

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are down there ready to stream out into the air and the sky. It therefore is not surprising that in these Avernian places toxic fumes arise that poison that portion of air so that any unfortunate bird that happens to venture too close 720 sickens, falls, and dies from that terrible exhalation. What appears to happen is that they first get dizzy and lose their orientation, which causes the fall, and then, as they breathe, they take in more and more of the poison until they vomit out their little lives in these very awful places. Another factor to be considered is that these gases coming out of Avernus affect the air and cleave it to leave an empty pocket through which birds cannot pass because nothing is there to support them, and the beat of their wings is abruptly useless and their feathers find no purchase whatever. 730 Therefore they fall of their own weight and crash to the ground where their souls escape at last through the pores of their broken bodies. Another odd thing in the world is how the water in wells is colder in the summer than it is in the winter. What happens is that earth is rarefied and sends the seeds of heat up into the air. Therefore, with fewer remaining down in the ground, the water down deep is colder. Contrariwise, in the winter, when the ground congeals and is dense, whatever seeds of heat are down there are closely retained,

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and the water in fact is warmer. In Egypt, near Ammon’s shrine, 740 some distance west of the Nile, is a spring that is cold in the daytime and boiling hot by night, which men find extremely odd, and they entertain the strange idea that beneath the earth there is a sun that makes the water boil in the darkness. This is, to say the least, a demonstration of faulty reasoning. If the sun beating down at noon on the water’s surface could not make it hot, although we know the Egyptian sunlight is full of an almost unbearable heat, how could it possibly be that from underneath the gross body of earth it could put forth through that mass the necessary warmth 750 to make the water boil? The heat of the sun can hardly pass through the walls of their houses, which is why they are built that way. But what is a plausible story? Let us suppose that the ground around the spring is porous, more there than elsewhere, and that there are many seeds of fire near that spring. At night when the earth cools, it contracts and therefore presses into the spring whatever seeds of warmth it contains, which enter the water and warm it. Then, when the sun comes up, the earth gets warmer, becoming of course more porous, and seeds of heat can return to where they had come from, dispersing and leaving 760

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the spring behind them, which, without their presence, cools, which is how the spring is cooler during the daylight hours. It is also true that water itself is agitated when the sun’s rays hit its surface, and this allows the discharge of its seeds of fire, in much the same way as water discharges its seeds of cold to melt and loosen the ties of ice. There is, at Dodona, a spring that is cold but over which one can hold a small amount of flax or hemp and it will at once catch fire. Or one can throw out a torch that it will ignite to shine as it floats on the water’s surface, 770 driven this way and that by the moment’s whims of the wind. The way to account for this is that the water there contains many seeds of heat that rise up through the spring from deep in the earth to emerge into the air—but not quite enough to make the water itself hot. There must be some force that makes them break the water’s surface and leap up into the air where they hover and collect. Just off the island of Aradus, there is a spring in the sea that sends up enough sweet water to keep the salt away, and I’m told there are other places like this that offer sailors 780 refreshing drink by sending up potable water in the midst of the ocean’s brine. Something like this must happen at Dodona, a kind of spring within a spring, where the heat

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comes up through the water to meet the hemp or flax on the surface where many seeds of fire will easily set them alight. There are other things that erupt into flame when you hold them close to a source of heat. A freshly extinguished wick if you put it next to a burning lamp will, before it touches, burst into fire. There are other things in nature that do this, igniting at some distance from the source of the kindling heat. 790 The spring may be odd but it is not unique in all the world and ignition without touching is replicated elsewhere. Now we come to the curious question of how it is that iron can be attracted by those stones the Greeks call Magnets, because they were first discovered within Magnesia’s borders. The stone can entertain men by the way it can make a chain of little iron rings that hang down from it, four or five in a string and swaying back and forth in the breeze, one under another, with the stone’s power transferred and oozing through the metal down to the bottom ring. 800 How can such a thing happen? And what does it mean? We must step back a bit and consider by long and roundabout ways what the reason might be, but patience, yours and mine, will get us there if I have your ears and your mind’s attention. Take a step back and recall that from everything we see there is a continual flow of bodies that scatter and strike

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our eyes to excite our vision. There is also from certain things a flow of odors that emanates outward. From rivers there comes cold, as heat comes from the sun, and spray from the waves that eat at the rocks on the shore. Sounds flow through the air 810 unceasingly, and even taste is broadcast as when we walk by the sea and the salt tang comes into our mouths, or when we look at wormwood being mixed with water our mouths pucker up from the bitter flavor. So let us agree that from all things different qualities flow outward in all directions. This happens without interruption, as we can tell, being able to see these things and smell and hear and taste them. I also remind you that all things are porous, as I explained in the first book of this poem. To understand this is vital in discussing many subjects, but here it is essential 820 to understand that in all things what we have are bodies mixed with voids. You remember that in caverns, rocks sweat with moisture and ooze drops of water. Sweat also oozes from us. Our beards grow, and our hairs all over our arms and legs. Food is dispersed through the veins to nourish parts of the body far away from the stomach and gut, even as far as the fingernails. Cold and heat also pass through bronze or gold or silver, when we hold cups made of these metals. Forgive me if I repeat myself

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but voices are able to pass through stone walls in a house, 830 and cold, and the heat of fire, which also can penetrate iron. And up in the sky the clouds are able to move through the heavens bringing their wild storms. Diseases, too, come through from somewhere outside, as tempests arise from the earth or come down from the sky, and then withdraw. Nothing exists that does not have a porous nature and texture allowing these things to happen. Not all the bodies that are cast off from various things have the same effect on the senses nor are they suited to all uses in the same way. The sun, for example, bakes the earth, making it dry, but it also melts ice and mountain snow, 840 which makes things wet. Wax when placed in heat turns liquid. Fire will also melt bronze and dissolve gold, but the skins and flesh of beasts it dries and shrivels up. The leaves of the olive tree are wonderful to goats that think of them as ambrosia bathed in nectar, but men find them dreadful and bitter and not at all to their taste. Pigs despise marjoram, but we like it a lot, and there are other spices that pigs hate like poison. We, on the other hand, don’t want to wallow in mud although pigs find that refreshing and can’t do it enough. 850 Another thing we need to remember is that the pores found in different things are different from one another

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and therefore they must be endowed with different natures. This is why there are different senses in different living creatures, and perceptions among them of sound or taste or odor are therefore unlikely to be exactly the same. One substance seems to be able to ooze through wood, while another can seep through stone, and another can penetrate gold or silver. Images flow through glass, and warmth through silver faster than through some other metals. The differences in their pores 860 is how we explain these results in the behaviors of different things. Now, having reviewed all that, we can turn to the present subject and the answer for which we are searching is not so hard to find. What we can deduce from the other examples allows us to make clear how the mass of the stone can attract the iron. To begin with many atoms are flowing out of the stone, or let us call them a current which by its constant assaults beats away the air between the stone and the iron. When this space is thus emptied, the atoms of the iron surge forward into that emptiness, all of them together, 870 and what results from this is that the entire ring comes along, for there are few things in the world in which the atoms are tighter and more closely intertwined than what we find in iron, with its chilliness and its roughness.

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This is why those atoms cannot move into the void without bringing along the rest of the ring’s substance which follows and then clings to the iron with unseen attachments. This happens in any direction, wherever an empty space is formed, on any side or up or down. The nearby bodies are carried at once into the void, impelled 880 by blows from behind, there being nothing in the empty space to obstruct them. They even rise up into the air. What facilitates this process is that this matter is added to the movement of the ring, so that its mass is pushing and the air behind it as well into the void before it. The air, after all, is always buffeting things, and on one side there is air that is pushing while, on the other side, there is not. This air insinuates itself into the iron’s pores, thrusting it forward and driving it as a wind drives the sails of a ship. And we have agreed that air 890 surrounds all things and also is hidden away inside the pores of things, and is always itself in restless movement. In this way it beats from within to push the ring toward the stone, flinging itself forward and trying to fill the void. It can also happen, however, that iron will recede from this very curious stone that it either flees or else follows. I have seen for myself iron filings from Samothrace that dance like mad enthusiasts in the bottoms of bronze bowls when this magnet stone was applied to the bowls’ bottoms and moved

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this way and that and filings would scurry out of the way, 900 even though the bronze was between the stone and the filings. What has to have happened is that bronze has its own current and this had taken possession of the channels within the iron. Then the stone’s current reached the iron but found it already occupied with no available room in which it could swim through as it had before. The result was that in its attempt to enter the iron, it found itself rejected and bounced back, so that even through the bronze, the iron filings appeared to flee in this strong reaction. There are, of course, some things that this stone seems not to affect, 910 gold for instance, but there are other things as well. The current from this stone cannot move gold, which is very firm. And other things that are porous it cannot affect, for the current will fly through them without sufficient resistance to attract it or repel it—wood is a good example. Iron’s nature is somewhere between these two extremes, and as a result the magnet is able to do what it does. But if we step back and consider, we find that these powers are not so strange after all, for in nature there are other things that display these affinities for each other and for nothing else. For example 920

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stones can be joined by mortar, and wood can be joined by the glue that is made from bulls, so that the grains of the boards themselves will come apart before the bond of the glue is sundered. Water and wine we know will mix together at once. But water and olive oil? Or water and pitch? No! That purple dye they get from certain seashells will join the fibers of wool in a way that never can be washed out, not even if you use Neptune’s entire store of water to rinse it with. You cannot solder gold to gold except by using borax, and bronze can be wedded to bronze 930 only with tin amalgam. There are many other examples one might adduce, but the point, I think, is made clearly enough, and being brief is a goal I keep in mind. What is surely the case is that when there are two things that have such a relation with one another, the reason must be that the empty places of one are a match for the full places the other brings to the combination to forge their union. It is not beyond the bounds of the possible that some substances may connect by a series of hooks and eyes that enable the bond of the kind we see with magnets and iron. 940 Now we come to the grim but important subject of how disease arises, where it comes from, and how it gathers force to afflict mankind as well as his flocks and herds, blowing upon them a storm of destruction, pain, and death. We have already discussed the fact that the seeds of some things

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are useful to us and support our lives, while others that fly about have a different effect and sicken us or kill us. When enough of these collect together to throw the air into a kind of turmoil, the air itself gets sick and from it the different diseases descend to afflict our bodies 950 as if they were clouds or noxious mists, or else they arise from the earth when it is damp or full of rot, and the rain has come too soon or too late, or the heat is too great or too little. We all know how changes in weather and water affect those who travel far from home, as their bodies adjust to the novelties of these things. The climate in Britain is different from what it is in Egypt, the world being on a slant. From the Pontus in the east to Cadiz, far to the west, the winds are different, the air is different, and so are the men who are quite unlike one another—as are their diseases, too. 960 Who else but the Egyptians are ever reported to have elephantiasis, which comes from the Nile and not elsewhere? In Attica there are bad feet; in Achaia eye ailments. In different locations various dangers arise to different parts of the body from the different airs and climates. Thus, when an alien sky sets itself in motion, and its turbulence causes commotion wherever it goes, it creeps

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along like a cloud or a mist and it brings on changes corrupting our own skies and making them like itself, and with it comes the threat of diseases and even sometimes of plagues. 970 It can float down to the waters or settle on fields of grain or other foods that we or our animals need to sustain life, or it can just hang there, suspended in the air, so that when we breathe we take it in and absorb it into our bodies. In just such a manner can pestilence come to our cows and bleating sheep. It doesn’t make much difference whether we travel to where the disease may lie in wait or remain at home waiting for it to come to us, for either way we’re at risk and liable to be afflicted. Such a visitation happened once to Cecrops’s 980 realm, ravaging Athens and the countryside around it so that roads there were deserted and the city emptied of men. They believe that it started in Egypt, deep in the south, and traveled through the wide expanse of air and over the stretched-out sea to arrive at last at Pandion’s kingdom and fall upon Athens where the people began to die in greater and greater numbers so that one might think of a large army defeated in battle the corpses of which entirely filled the hideous landscape. What happened first was a fever, the head hot and the eyes red as if on fire, but inside the throat was black 990

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and the victims sweated blood, and ulcers stopped their voices. The tongue was also bloody and lay there in the mouth, a heavy piece of meat that was roughened and could not move. From the throat the disease soon moved down to fill up the chest with fluid, and each painful breath had a nasty stench as if there were nearby corpses that were stinking out in the street. Some hallucinated, the mind’s powers failed, and the whole body grew faint and what little strength remained at death’s threshold they spent moaning bitter laments, or retching and trying to vomit, or enduring the violent cramps that afflicted them night and day. The muscles ached, preventing even a moment’s sleep, although they were wholly exhausted. The skin of a person with this disease felt only slightly warm to the hand, but its color was red and it was covered with ulcers as if a fire had burned it all over the limbs. Inside, however, the fever raged, a consuming fire that roasted the bones and made the stomach a living furnace. No cloth, no wispy tissue was light or flimsy enough so that the patient could bear its touch. They craved the cold,

1000

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were desperate for cooling breezes, and some plunged into water 1010 of cold rivers and streams. Some jumped into wells falling headlong, their mouths gaping with thirst beyond what any lake could quench. The pain was unremitting, and they lay there in desperation, their burning eyes rolling and demanding relief that the doctors’ arts could not provide as they looked down at their patients in exhaustion and helpless fear. Other signs and symptoms: dementia, depression, terror, rage, a buzz in the ears, difficulty in breathing, quick panting, or a ghastly rale, a dank sweat pouring down from head and neck, a fine thin spittle out of the mouth 1020 salty and yellow in color, and an unproductive cough that was nevertheless persistent. There were tremors in hands and feet, and the feet were cold, and the chill crept upward inch by inch. Toward the end, the nostrils narrowed and the tip of the nose became sharp. The eyes were sunken, the temples were hollow, the skin grew cold and hard, and the mouth was agape or fixed in a dreadful rictus. The forehead furrowed as if in tension or deep thought, and soon thereafter the end would come, and the limbs would stiffen.

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On the eighth day of the illness or sometimes it was the ninth, the terrible suffering stopped and the spirit at last departed. 1030 Now and then, a few with a strong constitution survived but these were no better off. Many were covered in ulcers, or they produced a black discharge that streamed from their bowels, and death in another form would take them. Some spewed corrupted blood from the nose and mouth, and all their strength would leave them, or if they survived this flux, the disease might pass to the limbs or even the genital organs causing such terrible pains, that some even took a knife to cut their penises off. Some lost hands or feet. Some went blind. And some went out of their minds and could not remember their own names. 1040 Unburied bodies lay in heaps on the ground and wild creatures would either flee from the noxious smell or try to feast on the carrion windfall and then sicken and die. Few birds were crossing the air, and few beasts in the forests for they, too, were afflicted and languished and then died, the dogs, first, those faithful companions of men. Their bodies lay in the roads where they dropped, the power of the plague

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having utterly drained the strength from their lively limbs. There were a few perfunctory funerals, but few mourners came to these, and nobody knew the cause of the illness 1050 or what to try to avoid, why one man continued to breathe the air that to others was poison and brought on a quick death. What was perhaps the saddest aspect of this plague was that anyone who detected the earliest symptoms knew that he was a dead man walking and, losing all heart and spirit, would lie down in despair to wait for his horrible end. Nothing seemed to prevent the contagion of this disease that spread from man to man, as among the flocks and herds, the animals all got sick so that death was piled upon death. If anyone shirked his duty and failed to visit the sick 1060 or minister to their pain, the god of Indifference would punish his selfishness and his greed for life by striking him down, alone, foul-smelling, painful, and without a kind word or look. But those who behaved better and did what they could for the sick out of a sense or duty or else to avoid the shame of admitting to their fears also caught the disease and sickened and died, and their loved ones spoke of them in sadness mixed with some reproach for their noble but foolish behavior.

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This was how the best of the men and women of Athens met their deaths, in agony but in no way without honor.

1070

. . . and by this time the shepherd and burly cowherd were also fainting away and dying, and their bodies lay in their huts. In the city’s dwelling places, you would find the corpses of parents and under them the lifeless bodies of all their children, or sometimes the parents died first, and the corpses of their children were lying on top, having died on their mothers’ and fathers’ cadavers. The consensus was that the disease first came into the city from the countryside when farmers and herdsmen streamed in from surrounding fields and pastures to sicken and die in the city and fill it with corpses. And there was a heat wave, so that more and more arrived 1080 and they, too, were sick. And outside the city, the roads were littered with bodies of dead and dying, burning with thirst, caked in filth, nothing but ulcerous skin and bones, barely covered in dirty rags and the dust of the highway. The temples of the gods, those sanctuaries, were also filled with lifeless bodies of those who had come imploring help or some relief, or merely a drink of water, and died there with the rest of the crowd. They hadn’t prayed,

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for the grief of the city was such that the power of gods was not at that moment highly regarded. The usual burial customs 1090 the city had always observed were now ignored and people buried their own dead in fear as much as in grief however they could manage. They stole from one another the wood with which to improvise some kind of pyre, and set the blaze alight and fought with the others looking for wood, even to the death in the glare of their burning corpses. . . .

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